The objective of this meta-epidemiological study was to explore the impact of attrition rates on treatment effect estimates in randomised trials of chronic inflammatory diseases (CID) treated with biological and targeted synthetic disease-modifying drugs. We sampled trials from Cochrane reviews. Attrition rates and primary endpoint results were…

The effect sizes of studies included in a meta-analysis do often not share a common true effect size due to differences in for instance the design of the studies. Estimates of this so-called between-study variance are usually imprecise. Hence, reporting a confidence interval together with a point estimate of the amount of between-study variance…

Meta-analyses of clinical trials targeting rare events face particular challenges when the data lack adequate numbers of events for all treatment arms. Especially when the number of studies is low, standard random-effects meta-analysis methods can lead to serious distortions because of such data sparsity. To overcome this, we suggest the use of…

Heterogeneity in meta-analysis is most commonly estimated using a moment-based approach described by DerSimonian and Laird. However, this method has been shown to produce biased estimates. Alternative methods to estimate heterogeneity include the restricted maximum likelihood approach and those proposed by Paule and Mandel, Sidik and Jonkman, and…

Motivated by our meta-analytic dataset involving survival rates after treatment for critical leg ischemia, we develop and apply a new multivariate model for the meta-analysis of study level survival data at multiple times. Our data set involves 50 studies that provide mortality rates at up to seven time points, which we model simultaneously, and…