391,982 papers found

Network meta-analysis is a methodology for comparing different treatments or modalities including both direct comparisons and indirect comparisons based on a common comparator. While this provides a wealth of opportunities in psychiatric research, both designing a network meta-analysis and interpreting the same require…

The current rapid pace of social and technological change requires health policy makers to be up to date in their knowledge of health policy research. The "information explosion" has created a need for techniques that synthesize and summarize available information. This paper reviews the use of Meta-Analysis as a data…

In most, if not all, healthcare conditions, there is a plethora of competing interventions with few head-to-head comparisons and classical meta-analysis fails to handle simultaneously the multiple comparisons among interventions. Network meta-analysis is an extension of pairwise meta-analysis to accommodate multiple in…

Meta-analysis is an impressive tool for systematic synthesis of health care management and policy research findings. Used wisely, it can impose an appealing order on the chaos of a large body of evidence. Occasionally, it can even contribute to resolution of a clinical controversy. However, the technique is currently i…

As an important approach to secondary research, Meta-analysis provides researchers with a means to supplement evidence. However, though being considered the highest level of evidence, the application of Meta-analysis in acupuncture faces challenges. Despite a substantial number of acupuncture Meta-analyses exists, the…

Prokopidis et al have conducted a meta-analysis of randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials to assess the effects of oral creatine supplementation on memory performance of healthy individuals. However, concerns were raised regarding the validity of their statistical analyses, which may have led to misleading conc…

Network meta-analysis allows researchers to synthesise both direct and indirect evidence, thus enabling simultaneous comparisons of multiple treatments. A relatively recent addition to evidence synthesis in reproductive medicine, this approach has become increasingly popular. Yet, the underlying assumptions of network…

In this study we investigated the influence of data nonnormality in the primary studies on meta-analysis of the standardized mean difference (SMD) for a two-independent-group design. The bias, mean squared error, and confidence interval coverage probability of the mean effect sizes under different types of population d…

Systematic reviews ideally provide a comprehensive and unbiased summary of existing evidence from clinical studies, whilst meta-analysis combines the results of these studies to produce an overall estimate. Collectively, this makes them invaluable for clinical decision-making. Although the number of published systemati…

This paper investigates the use of SIMEX, a simulation-based measurement error correction technique, for meta-analysis of studies involving the baseline risk of subjects in the control group as explanatory variable. The approach accounts for the measurement error affecting the information about either the outcome in th…