How to Handle Multi-Arm Studies in Network Meta-Analysis

• In Event: Advancing Methods for Meta-Analysis in Education Research

Abstract

The inclusion of multi-arm studies in meta-analysis has become prevalent in the past decade. This brings problems in the data analysis due to the comparisons being correlated. Most strategies suggested in the literature mainly deal with the standard meta-analysis, i.e., pairwise comparisons. However, there has been an increasing need to compare many drugs or treatments in one meta-analysis study, which introduced network meta-analysis (NMA) to researchers. How to handle multi-arms in NMA becomes a great challenge, and very few researchers have been working on this issue. The present study is to tackle this challenge. More specifically, we will review the most updated statistical methods that can handle this challenge and also illustrate these methods using a real data set.

Authors

• Guanyu Chen, The University of British Columbia

• Yan Liu, Carleton University