I need to run an economic evaluation model of 6 drugs based on secondary data of a network meta-analysis study which has covered 21 drugs. This study also has reported separate pairwise head to head data. My concrete question it is that due to the use of only parts of the whole analyses (6 drugs out of 21) which of the following approaches is accurate?
1. Extracting required data (6 drugs out of 21) through pairwise analysis or
2. Extracting required data (6 drugs out of 21) through network meta-analysis
Pairwise analysis may be more appropriate because it includes direct comparison only while network meta-analysis is the combination of direct and indirect comparisons.
Also, you can use both approaches in your analysis, and report both results in the manuscript.
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