Start by loading the NHANES data and dplyr package.

library(dplyr)
library(NHANES)
data(NHANES)

In the previous practicum you categorized IQ scores in 2 categories with an if-statement and an ifelse function Section 3.3.2. We want to do the same with systolic blood pressure data (BPSysAve)from the NHANES dataset but this time using four categories instead of two.

Blood Pressure Classification systolic blood pressure
Normal < 120
Prehypertension 120–139
Stage 1 Hypertension 140–159
Stage 2 Hypertension ≥ 160

Doing this with if-statements or ifelse functions would at least require three levels of nesting. This is where the tidyverse conditionals case_when and between come in handy.

Pitfall

All values that don’t meet a specified case will be replaced with NA by case_when

Exercise