Related Experiment Video
Updated: Apr 13, 2026
Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting Propensity Score using the Military Health System Data Repository and National Death Index
Published on: January 8, 2020
Methods and characteristics of published network meta-analyses using individual patient data: protocol for a scoping
Areti Angeliki Veroniki1, Charlene Soobiah2, Andrea C Tricco1
1Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Introduction:
Individual patient data (IPD) meta-analysis (MA) offers advantages over aggregate MA of using standardised criteria for patient characteristics across trials, and allowing reliable investigation of subgroup effects of interventions. Network meta-analysis (NMA) allows for the comparison of multiple treatments in a comprehensive analysis and the determination of the best treatment among several competing treatments, including those that have never been compared in a head-to-head study. Including IPD in NMA may enable the prevention of misleading inferences due to several biases, such as aggregation bias. Application of IPD-NMA methods in healthcare have begun to appear in medical journals. Our objective is to conduct a scoping review of existing IPD-NMA methods, and summarise their properties. We also aim to describe the characteristics of empirical IPD-NMAs, and examine how their results are reported.
Methods And Analysis:
We will search relevant electronic databases from inception until October 2014 (eg, MEDLINE), grey literature, and Google. The scoping review will consider published and unpublished papers that report completion of an IPD-NMA, describe a method, or report the methodological quality of IPD-NMA. We will include IPD-NMA of any quantitative study (eg, experimental, quasiexperimental, observational studies). Two reviewers will independently screen titles, abstracts and full-text articles, and will complete data abstraction. The anticipated outcome will be a collection of all the IPD-NMAs completed to date, and a description of their methods and reporting of results. We will create summary tables providing the characteristics of the included studies, and the various methods. Quantitative data (eg, number of patients) will be summarised by medians and IQRs, and categorical data (eg, type of effect size) by frequencies and percentages.
Ethics And Dissemination:
Ethical approval is not required as our study will not include confidential participant data and interventions. We will disseminate our results through an open access, peer-reviewed publication.
Related Concept Videos
01:12Analysis of Population Pharmacokinetic Data
01:23Mechanistic Models: Compartment Models in Individual and Population Analysis
01:24Kaplan-Meier Approach
01:06Model Approaches for Pharmacokinetic Data: Distributed Parameter Models
The distributed parameter models are specifically designed to account for variations and differences in some drug classes. This model is particularly useful for assessing regional concentrations of anticancer or...
00:59Model-Independent Approaches for Pharmacokinetic Data: Noncompartmental Analysis
One important characteristic of noncompartmental analyses is that drug exposure increases proportionally with increasing doses. This...
01:23Types of Biopharmaceutical Studies: Controlled and Non-Controlled Approaches
Non-controlled studies, commonly employed for initial exploration, lack a control group, rendering them susceptible to biases and external influences. In contrast,...