Contemporary clinical trials
-
Contemp Clin Trials · May 2015
Meta AnalysisA multilevel approach to network meta-analysis within a frequentist framework.
Meta-analysis is a powerful tool to summarize knowledge. Pairwise or network meta-analysis may be carried out with multivariate models that account for the dependence between treatment estimates and quantify the correlation across studies. From a different perspective, meta-analysis may be viewed as a special case of multilevel analysis having a hierarchical data structure. ⋯ Finally, we compare the results from our approach with those from a Bayesian network meta-analysis on a binary endpoint which examines the effect on mortality of some anesthetics at the longest follow-up available. In addition, we compare results from the Bayesian and multilevel network meta-analysis approaches on a publicly available "Thrombolytic drugs" database. We also provide the reader with a blueprint of SAS codes for fitting the proposed models, although our approach does not rely on any specific software.