Engineering Commons^™

Meta-Analysis Of Two-Treatment Clinical Trials Including Both Continuous And Dichotomous Results, Charles F. Babbs

Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications

To expedite the timely creation of medical practice guidelines, a meta-analytic method was developed to combine of both dichotomous survival data and continuous physiologic data from multiple studies comparing the same innovative clinical intervention to standard care. The method is adapted for synthesis of small, early studies of novel treatments. An aggregate ratio, R*, of the observed treatment effect to a clinically optimal treatment effect for studies in a series is computed, and compared to the 95% confidence limit for R* under the null hypothesis. Weights assigned to each study may reflect its precision, quality, or clinical relevance. Input data …