I have a CSV file with a field storing SNOMED codes. This is an encoded collection of medical terms, e.g.
  • 10623005 "Fibrous dysplasia of bone"
  • 111246005 "Arthrogryposis"
  • 111315008 "Longitudinal deficiency of tibia AND/OR fibula"
  • 12247221000119104 "Patellofemoral syndrome of bilateral knees"
  • 15670601000119100 "Congenital genu valgum of bilateral knees"

Some of the codes are 17 digits long. When I open the CSV file in Notepad or WordPad I can see the values are stored as integers, e.g. 15670601000119100. However, Stata stores these values in a double data type using scientific notation. For example, 15670601000119100 is stored as 1.567e+16. As such, I’m unable to even define a value label. Stata gives me an error message like this one:
may not label 1.22472e+16

The values in the SNOMED variable are all integers, so, in theory, Stata should be able to define and attach value labels to it. However, the maximum value for a long integer in Stata is 2,147,483,620. Does anyone know of a way around this?