Meta-analysis allows researchers to combine evidence from multiple studies, making it a powerful tool for synthesizing information on the safety profiles of new medical interventions. There is a critical need to identify subgroups at high risk of experiencing treatment-related toxicities. However, this remains quite challenging from a statistical…

The performance of statistical methods is often evaluated by means of simulation studies. In case of network meta-analysis of binary data, however, simulations are not currently available for many practically relevant settings. We perform a simulation study for sparse networks of trials under between-trial heterogeneity and including multi-arm…

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…

Network meta-analysis (NMA) combines direct and indirect evidence from trials to calculate and rank treatment estimates. While modelling approaches for continuous and binary outcomes are relatively well developed, less work has been done with time-to-event outcomes. Such outcomes are usually analysed using Cox proportional hazard (PH) models.…

When combining results across related studies, a multivariate meta-analysis allows the joint synthesis of correlated effect estimates from multiple outcomes. Joint synthesis can improve efficiency over separate univariate syntheses, may reduce selective outcome reporting biases, and enables joint inferences across the outcomes. A common issue is…