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Meta-Analysis of 2-Treatment Clinical Trials Including Both Continuous and Dichotomous ResultsDepartment of Basic Medical Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana To expedite the timely creation of medical practice guidelines, a meta-analytic method was developed to combine both dichotomous survival data and continuous physiologic data from multiple studies of differing experimental design, which compare the same innovative clinical intervention to standard care. 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. Input data for continuous variables include sample means, standard errors, and sample sizes. Input data for dichotomous variables include group proportions and sizes. The analysis can be done using a simple, 1-page spreadsheet. It allows one to judge biological significance, to test for statistical significance, to compare subgroups of studies, to test for outliers, and to compute the power of the meta-analysis. These features are demonstrated for studies of interposed abdominal compression-cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Key Words: abdominal • cardiopulmonary resuscitation • confidence intervals • continuous • data interpretation • evidence-based medicine • interposed abdominal compression • orphan drugs • pediatric research
Medical Decision Making, Vol. 24, No. 3,
299-312 (2004) This article has been cited by other articles:
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