An empirical study on 209 networks of treatments revealed intransitivity to be common and multiple statistical tests suboptimal to assess transitivity.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Transitivity assumption is the cornerstone of network meta-analysis (NMA). Investigating the plausibility of transitivity can unveil the credibility of NMA results. The commonness of transitivity was examined based on study dissimilarities regarding several study-level aggregate clinical and methodological characteristics reported in the systematic reviews. The present study also demonstrated the disadvantages of using multiple statistical tests to assess transitivity and compared the conclusions drawn from multiple statistical tests with those from the approach of study dissimilarities for transitivity assessment.

Methods

An empirical study was conducted using 209 published systematic reviews with NMA to create a database of study-level aggregate clinical and met

SUBMITTER: Spineli LM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11648297 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature