Dear RG members.
Im planing to conduct a Systematic review about the choice of a surgical approach for the treatment of a surgical condition.
My problem is that the majority of the studies are observational and they report results like this: "Patients with the condition were admitted to the ER. Intervention X was done in 15 of the 45 patients while intervention Y was done in 30 of the 45 patients"... Well these could be taken a comparison groups, but I dont want to compare this in a meta-analysis since the data is from observational research.
Instead of conduct a meta analysis of comparisons. I want to do a proportion meta-analysis by taking the proportion of outcome A from the intervention X and the proportion of outcome A from the intervention Y and pooling these proportions between studies instead of compare them. Do you believe this is possible?
Form example if one of my outcomes si "Re-operation" i would say something like: Re operation for bleeding was done in approximately 56% (CI95% XX-XX) of the patients with the X intervention. On the other hand, re operation for bleeding was done in approximately 30% of patients with the Y intervention. (NO COMPARING)
Do you thing is better to perform a classic meta analysis using a random effects model by comparing outcomes in groups and between studies? or do you believe my approach is a good one.
Thanks.
Ramiro
I can guess you are using Review Manager software because it lacks this option.
I advise you to try these softwares:
You can do such analysis on Open Meta[analyst] software.
Select "One Group" > "Proportions". It is very easy!
Good Luck
Hi,
one approach is to calculate SE's using the delta method. If you have enough groups in your comparison you can also use generalized estimating equations (which help to deal with the issue that two groups from the same study are not statistically independent). Here is how I did it with >100 groups.
Hurley, JC (2014). Ventilator-associated pneumonia prevention methods using topical antibiotics: herd protection or herd peril? CHEST, 146(4), 890-898.
http://journal.publications.chestnet.org/article.aspx?articleid=1912465
Hurley, JC (2014). Topical antibiotics as a major contextual hazard toward bacteremia within selective digestive decontamination studies: a meta-analysis. BMC Infect Dis, 14(1), 1.
https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-014-0714-x
I have published my tutorial on meta-analysis of proportions on ResearchGate as a preprint. You can find it here: Preprint How to Conduct a Meta-Analysis of Proportions in R: A Compre...
The tutorial teaches you how to do such an analysis in R step by step.
In my opinion, your research question is not well-defined, you should formulate it more precisely:
If you want only to analyze the prevalence of one procedure, you can use proportion as described. In that case, you'll have a meta-analysis of prevalence of that procedure in the studies.
If you would like to analyse percentages of use of multiple procedures, you can still use proportion for each of them, and in the end compare the confidence intervals, or you can try some comparison method for the procedures you deem most important for some reason. Those studies you call observational give you enough quantitative information for comparison of procedures.
I want to do meta analyses of number of certain mutation present in total number of cases investigated in various studies reported. How to do meta analyses and which software is best?
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