However, NMA remains, to a large degree, a privilege for researchers with advanced computational and statistical knowledge. The advantages of NMA have made it an increasingly popular method in comparative effectiveness research. The assumption of consistency (agreement between direct and indirect sources of evidence) underlies the methodology and if it holds, NMA can give valuable information to patients, practitioners and decision makers. The integration of direct evidence (from studies directly comparing interventions) with indirect evidence (information about two treatments derived via a common comparator) increases the precision in the estimates and produces a relative ranking of all treatments for the studied outcome. Network meta-analysis (NMA) synthesizes data from a network of trials about more than two competing healthcare interventions.
0 kommentar(er)
