Prevalence of evidence of inconsistency and its association with network structural characteristics in 201 published networks of interventions.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Network meta-analysis (NMA) has attracted growing interest in evidence-based medicine. Consistency between different sources of evidence is fundamental to the reliability of the NMA results. The purpose of the present study was to estimate the prevalence of evidence of inconsistency and describe its association with different NMA characteristics.

Methods

We updated our collection of NMAs with articles published up to July 2018. We included networks with randomised clinical trials, at least four treatment nodes, at least one closed loop, a dichotomous primary outcome, and available arm-level data. We assessed consistency using the design-by-treatment interaction (DBT) model and testing all the inconsistency parameters globally through the Wald-type chi-squared test

SUBMITTER: Veroniki AA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8543923 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature