392,164 papers found

Hunasikatti M. Effect of treatment of central sleep apnea/Cheyne-Stokes respiration on left ventricular ejection fraction in heart failure: a network meta-analysis is not the answer.. 2020;16(4):651–652.

The volume of medical literature is growing at a rate that renders decision-making difficult without specialized summary tools. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are important research instruments used to condense and clarify a broad scope of information into manageable summaries. When used effectively, these report…

A primary goal of meta-analysis is to improve the estimation of treatment effects by pooling results of similar studies. This article explains how the most widely used method for pooling heterogeneous studies--the Der Simonian-Laird (DL) estimator--can produce biased estimates with falsely high precision. A classic exa…

The author discusses the significance and potential pitfalls in performing a meta-analysis underscoring the importance of a usual forgotten issue in meta-analysis called clinical heterogeneity. Clinical heterogeneity can mislead results and misinform clinicians. Practical examples from the literature are given, and the…

Meta-analysis is often conducted with only a small number of studies. Adjustments of the (restricted) maximum likelihood estimator of the effect size are derived and their gains in efficiency are explored. The proposed estimators are applied to three sets of studies.

This paper presents a new approach for confidence interval estimation of the between-study variance in meta-analysis with normally distributed responses based on the concepts of generalized variables. Simulation study shows that the coverage probabilities of the proposed confidence intervals are generally satisfactory.…

This review covers the basic principles of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The problems associated with traditional narrative reviews are discussed, as is the role of systematic reviews in limiting bias associated with the assembly, critical appraisal, and synthesis of studies addressing specific clinical questio…

When performing a meta analysis, it is often necessary to combine results from several 2 x 2 contingency tables. The Mantel-Haenszel model assumes a common measure of association between the treatment and outcome variables across the tables. A Bayesian method is described for drawing inferences regarding the measure of…

In this paper, we describe an exact method for estimating a common relative risk across different epidemiologic study designs. The types of studies allowed by the method include case-control studies, follow-up studies with an internal comparison group, and follow-up studies with an external comparison group. Because th…

We propose the adaptation of classical monitoring boundaries for use in cumulative meta-analysis as guidelines for deciding when accumulating evidence is statistically significant and medically convincing. The interpretation of information from a randomized controlled trial is compared with that from a meta-analysis. T…

Synthesis of research findings has long been a part of reviewing and summarizing a field of study. Public health decisions are made on the available evidence. We summarize the approaches to research synthesis that draw on the best available evidence and the use of quantitative summaries through meta-analysis. We focus…

Meta-analysis seems to have a potentially useful role in carefully selected situations where the primary literature is of good quality, heterogeneity in the response to treatment of the tested population is small and well-understood, interest centers on estimation of a specific, critical parameter of outcome, and the m…

Although meta-analysis is now well established as a method of reviewing evidence, an uncritical use of the technique can be very misleading. One common problem is the failure to investigate appropriately the sources of heterogeneity, in particular the clinical differences between the studies included. This paper distin…

Multiple clinical studies require a structured synthesis of their results, especially where heterogeneous results are reported. Meta-analysis is a method that does just that. Such an epidemiological study of results across studies replaces the traditional narrative review of literature, and its study completes, but doe…

The reported studies of the association between smoking and the incidence of peptic ulcer have had nonconclusive results. Therefore, we have carried out a quantitative review including and evaluating all the factors related to that association. To this end, the techniques of meta-analysis suggested by Rosenthal have be…