Features of Meta-Epidemiology, Meta-Meta- Epidemiology and Network Meta-Epidemiology in Emergency Medicine

Short Communication

Austin Emerg Med. 2016; 2(8): 1044.

Features of Meta-Epidemiology, Meta-Meta- Epidemiology and Network Meta-Epidemiology in Emergency Medicine

Roever L¹* and Biondi-Zoccai G2,3

¹Department of Clinical Research, Federal University of Uberlândia, Uberlândia, Brazil

²Department of Medico-Surgical Sciences and Biotechnologies, Sapienza University of Rome, Latina, Italy

³Department of Angio Cardio Neurology, IRCCS Neuromed, Pozzill, Italy

*Corresponding author: Leonardo Roever, Department of Clinical Research, Av. Pará, 1720–Bairro, Umuarama, Uberlândia-MG-CEP 38400-902, Brazil

Received: September 27, 2016; Accepted: October 04, 2016; Published: October 06, 2016

Introduction

The effectiveness of treatments ideally comes from randomized clinical trials (RCTs) or systematic reviews of trials that assess final endpoints. Many aspects of the design and conduct of RCTs have been shown to lead to overestimation of treatment effect size. These include [1-7]:

The definition of meta-epidemiology was introduced with considering the methodological limitations of systematic review for intervention trials. Meta-epidemiology study aims to describe the distribution of research evidence for a specific issue, to examine the heterogeneity and associated risk factors, and also to control bias between studies and summarize evidence. Diverse methods, such as meta-regression, imputation, informative missing odds ratio, two statistical models, and others, were attempted, and the term metaepidemiology [8-15].

Meta-epidemiology is focused as a research paper not being a simple meta-analysis or narrative review we usually encounter in the literature; it is clearly though a sort of meta-review. In metaepidemiology, one restriction is that informative meta-analyses must include at least one trial with and one without the risk factor of interest, and a minimum number of trials per meta-analysis may be required, depending on how heterogeneity is modelled and multivariable analyses are undertaken [8-15].

The meta-epidemiological, the point of analysis are meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials; for meta-meta-epidemiology, the point are meta-epidemiologic studies, and for network epidemiology, the point are meta-analysis (MA) of randomized controlled trials published where data had been analyzed with a valid statistical method for indirect comparisons or network meta-analysis(NMA) [8-16].

The meta-epidemiology is based on the combination of two concepts: epidemiology and meta-analysis. To fit the purposes of these two concepts, meta-epidemiology strives to achieve the following [16]:

More differences are shown in Table 1 [8-16].

Citation: Roever L and Biondi-Zoccai G. Features of Meta-Epidemiology, Meta-Meta-Epidemiology and Network Meta-Epidemiology in Emergency Medicine. Austin Emerg Med. 2016; 2(8): 1044. ISSN : 2473-0653