ONLINE - Assessment of Homogeneity and Consistency for Network Meta-Analysis

01.10.2021 15:15 – 16:15

RESEARCH CENTER FOR STATISTICS SEMINAR / ABSTRACT

One of the long-standing methodological issues in network meta analysis (NMA) is that of assessing homogeneity and consistency in treatment comparisons. However, the consistency assumption may not hold in the presence of heterogeneity. In this paper, we construct general linear hypotheses to investigate homogeneity and consistency under a general fixed effects model. An algorithm is developed to compute all the inconsistency testable loops in network meta-data, as well as the contrast matrices under homogeneity and consistency assumptions. Under the normal fixed effects model, we show the equivalence of the likelihood ratio test (LRT) under the proposed linear hypotheses and Bucher's method for testing inconsistency based on comparison of the weighted averages of direct and indirect treatment effects. A novel Plausibility Index (PI) is developed to assess homogeneity and consistency. Theoretical properties of the proposed methodology are examined in details. A road map for ranking treatments is further proposed. We apply the proposed methodology to analyze the network meta data from 29 randomized clinical trials with 34 active dose-level treatment arms plus placebo (PBO) on safety and efficacy evaluation of cholesterol lowering drugs.

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