[Generating person-years and calculating SMR using SAS: a simple program for exact calculations].

The computation of standardized incidence/mortality ratios or Poisson regression requires the calculation of person-years generated in a cohort. Softwares can do that, but SAS users still need to program this step themselves. Various algorithms were published previously, but they do not perform exact calculations: the present paper describes a simple program, which creates exact person-years, and computes SMRs. This program provides a referenced tool to perform this analysis in a cohort, with SAS or another language (the algorithm used can be easily adapted).