392,549 papers found

AIMS: This paper highlights the lack of consideration that is given to power in the health and social sciences, which is a continuing problem with both single study research and more importantly for meta-analysis. BACKGROUND: The power of a study is the probability that it will lead to a statistically significant resu…

Bayesian modeling offers an elegant approach to meta-analysis that efficiently incorporates all sources of variability and relevant quantifiable external information. It provides a more informative summary of the likely value of parameters after observing the data than do non-Bayesian approaches. This leads to direct p…

Patients treated for cancer with chemotherapy and other cytoreductive therapy often develop serious bacterial, viral, and fungal infections due to B- and T-cell depletion, neutropenia and decreased barrier function of mucosal membranes. In patients with neutropenic fever not responding to broad spectrum antibiotic ther…

The standard approach to inference for random effects meta-analysis relies on approximating the null distribution of a test statistic by a standard normal distribution. This approximation is asymptotic on k, the number of studies, and can be substantially in error in medical meta-analyses, which often have only a few s…

Meta-analysis is a quantitative method available to epidemiologists, psychologists, social scientists and others who wish to produce a summary measure of the effect of exposure on disease, based on results from published studies along with a summary measure of uncertainty. The magnitude of the effect vary from study to…

BACKGROUND: Meta-analysis, the systematic and quantitative synthesis of evidence, has developed considerably in the 1990s and is emerging as an important methodology in medical decision making. As a research methodology, meta-analysis has benefits and limitations that must be acknowledged in its application. EXAMPLES…

Earlier work showed how to perform fixed-effects meta-analysis of studies or trials when each provides results on more than one outcome per patient and these multiple outcomes are correlated. That fixed-effects generalized-least-squares approach analyzes the multiple outcomes jointly within a single model, and it can i…

Statistical methods are available for performing a meta-analysis when the response variable of interest is the same in each study. Problems arise when studies exploring a common therapeutic question use different patient response types. This article presents statistical methods for combining studies which involve diffe…

1. A meta-analysis has been performed on nine placebo controlled trials of vigabatrin (GVG) administered as add-on therapy to patients suffering from drug resistant epilepsy. 2. There were two pilot placebo-controlled dose ranging studies, six double-blind crossover studies and a multicentre response controlled study.…

Meta-analysis is a cornerstone of evidence synthesis, yet challenges arise when studies report heterogeneous summary statistics, such as means and standard deviations (SDs) versus medians, interquartile ranges (IQRs), or other percentiles. Excluding studies that report only medians and IQRs can introduce bias and reduc…

INTRODUCTION: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia impose a significant burden on individuals and their caregivers. Dyadic psychosocial education, which treats care recipients and their caregivers as a pair of active participants, has the potential to improve health outcomes for people with cognitive impairment…

BACKGROUND: Although aggregate data (AD) from randomised clinical trials (RCTs) are used in the majority of network meta-analyses (NMAs), other study designs (e.g., cohort studies and other non-randomised studies, NRS) can be informative about relative treatment effects. The individual participant data (IPD) of the stu…

INTRODUCTION: In recent years, the incidence of thyroid cancer has increased manyfold and young adults, who have a greater financial burden and occupational stress, comprise a large number. Previous studies have shown mixed results, even distinct results, on suicide rates among thyroid cancer survivors. As the overdiag…