admetan: A new, comprehensive meta-analysis command

David Fisher ()
Additional contact information
David Fisher: MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL

London Stata Conference 2018 from Stata Users Group

Abstract: Meta-analysis (MA) is a statistical technique for combining results from multiple independent studies, with the aim of estimating a single overall effect with a size, direction and precision consistent with the data. Traditionally, MA is performed on aggregated data (AD), where each observation represents the effect observed in a study, often derived from study publications. The user-written command metan (Harris et al. 2008) is by far the most popular Stata command for performing AD MA, but it was last updated in 2010 and has various flaws and limitations. The alternative to AD MA is to obtain and analyse individual participant data (IPD), where the totality of data from all studies are stacked to form a single, large dataset. I have previously described (Fisher 2015) a user-written command, ipdmetan, which facilitates so-called ‘two-stage’ IPD MA. The two stages are fitting a given model to the data from each study in turn and combining the results using AD techniques. The second stage, performed using the AD command admetan, has now been expanded into a fully comprehensive AD MA command, with all the functionality of metan and much more besides. The co-author and maintainer of metan, Ross Harris, has confirmed to me that he is no longer in a position to maintain it and is happy for admetan to take its place. Another important aspect of ipdmetan (and hence also admetan) is its forest plot capabilities. Not only is the forest plot engine much more efficient and capable of better plots ‘out of the box’ when compared with metan; it also allows the user to save and edit ‘forestplot results sets’ which are interpreted directly by the stand-alone program forestplot to produce fully flexible plots. I will take you on a quick tour of admetan and forestplot and hope to encourage you (and your colleagues and collaborators!) to use them in preference to metan.

Date: 2018-10-15
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.org/usug2018/Stata2018Fisher.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boc:usug18:06

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in London Stata Conference 2018 from Stata Users Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christopher F Baum ().