can tbl_summary() leave empty value instead of NA/ missing values?

January 14, 2022

I am using tbl_summary() to summarize clinical characteristics of a patient cohort.

I have a patient group and a control group. My problem is that I have more variables for the patient group (blood counts etc.) that are not available for the control group.

Example data:

library(gtsummary)

group <- rep(c("Kontrol","Patient"),times=c(5,10))
age <- floor(runif(15, min=20, max=101))
sex <- rep(c("male","female","male","female"), times=c(3,2,7,3))
Hemoglobin <-  as.numeric(c(rep("",times=5),7.21,7.52,10.41,10.03,8.95,6.24,8.54,14.22,8.76,7.57))

df <- data.frame(group,age,sex,Hemoglobin)

df %>% tbl_summary(by=group)

enter image description here

so my question is can I make a table where these variables will have an empty value in the control column? something like:
enter image description here

Thanks for your help!

>Solution :

It seems that you can’t achieve the desired results only by using the arguments provided by the function (e.g. missing and missing_text arguments). You have to locally modify the list object.

library(gtsummary)

group <- rep(c("Kontrol","Patient"),times=c(5,10))
age <- floor(runif(15, min=20, max=101))
sex <- rep(c("male","female","male","female"), times=c(3,2,7,3))
Hemoglobin <-  as.numeric(c(rep("",times=5),7.21,7.52,10.41,10.03,8.95,6.24,8.54,14.22,8.76,7.57))

df <- data.frame(group,age,sex,Hemoglobin)

table <- 
  df %>% 
  tbl_summary(by=group, missing="no")  

table$table_body$stat_1[table$table_body$stat_1 == "NA (NA, NA)"] <- NA

table

^{Created on 2022-01-14 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}