During drug development, evidence can emerge to suggest a treatment is more effective in a specific patient subgroup. Whilst early trials may be conducted in biomarker-mixed populations, later trials are more likely to enroll biomarker-positive patients alone, thus leading to trials of the same treatment investigated in different populations. When…

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…

Existing systems for automating the assessment of risk-of-bias (RoB) in medical studies are supervised approaches that require substantial training data to work well. However, recent revisions to RoB guidelines have resulted in a scarcity of available training data. In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of generative large language…

Population-adjusted indirect comparisons, developed in the 2010s, enable comparisons between two treatments in different studies by balancing patient characteristics in the case where individual patient-level data (IPD) are available for only one study. Health technology assessment (HTA) bodies increasingly rely on these methods to inform funding…

Drug repurposing refers to the process of discovering new therapeutic uses for existing medicines. Compared to traditional drug discovery, drug repurposing is attractive for its speed, cost, and reduced risk of failure. However, existing approaches for drug repurposing involve complex, computationally-intensive analytical methods that are not…

Some patients benefit from a treatment while others may do so less or do not benefit at all. We have previously developed a two-stage network meta-regression prediction model that synthesized randomized trials and evaluates how treatment effects vary across patient characteristics. In this article, we extended this model to combine different…

Systematic reviewers are advised to search trials registers to minimise risk of reporting biases. However, there has been little research on the impact of searching trials registers on the results of meta-analyses. We aimed to evaluate the impact of searching clinical trials registers for systematic reviews of pharmaceutical or non-pharmaceutical…

One of the main goals of an individual participant data meta-analysis (IPD-MA) of intervention studies is to investigate whether treatment effect differences are present, and how they are associated with patient characteristics. Examining treatment heterogeneity due to a continuous covariable (e.g., BMI or age) may be challenging, since there is…

A substantial proportion of trial registrations are not linked to corresponding published articles, limiting analyses and new tools. Our aim was to develop a method for finding articles reporting the results of trials that are registered on ClinicalTrials.gov when they do not include metadata links. We used a set of 27,280 trial registration and…

When studies use different scales to measure continuous outcomes, standardised mean differences (SMD) are required to meta-analyse the data. However, outcomes are often reported as endpoint or change from baseline scores. Combining corresponding SMDs can be problematic and available guidance advises against this practice. We aimed to examine the…

Background: Network meta-analysis (NMA) produces complex outputs as many comparisons between interventions are of interest. The estimated relative treatment effects are usually displayed in a forest plot or in a league table and several ranking metrics are calculated and presented. Methods: In this article, we estimate relative treatment effects…

It is often challenging to present the available evidence in a timely and comprehensible manner. We aimed to visualize the evolution of evidence about antidepressants for depression by conducting cumulative network meta-analyses (NMAs) and to examine whether it could have helped the selection of optimal drugs. We built a Shiny web application that…

Threshold analysis has recently been proposed to be used in combination with the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) in order to assess the sensitivity to plausible bias of treatment recommendations derived from Bayesian network meta-analysis (NMA). Here, it was aimed to apply the combination of threshold…

Network meta-analysis (NMA) can be used to compare multiple competing treatments for the same disease. In practice, usually a range of outcomes is of interest. As the number of outcomes increases, summarizing results from multiple NMAs becomes a nontrivial task, especially for larger networks. Moreover, NMAs provide results in terms of relative…

During drug development, a biomarker is sometimes identified as separating a patient population into those with more and those with less benefit from evaluated treatments. Consequently, later studies might be targeted, while earlier ones are performed in mixed patient populations. This poses a challenge in evidence synthesis, especially if only…