We are very happy to announce our 10th online seminar in the Biostatistics Seminar Series on Thursday, January 30th, 16h-17h (CET)

This series of Biostatistics seminars targets a broad (bio)statistical audience, in particular PhD-students. Specialists discuss a topic of their interest, paying particular attention to concepts relevant and accessible to a non-specialist audience as well.

Speaker
Dimitris Mavridis
Associate professor of statistics Department of Primary Education University of Ioannina.
Editor-in-chief for Research Synthesis Methods.

Title
A gentle introduction to network meta-analysis. Current state and future challenges

Abstract
Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) are the gold standard of clinical trials for assessing interventions’ efficacy. For most healthcare problems, there is a plethora of RCTs and competing interventions. Network meta-analysis (NMA) is a powerful statistical method that allows us to estimate the relative efficacy between competing interventions addressing the similar research question, even if these have never been compared directly in an RCT. Suppose that we have a simple network of three interventions (A, B and C) and that there are RCTs comparing AvsB and AvsC. We can infer about the relative efficacy between interventions B and C indirectly because they are both compared to A. Even if there are RCTs directly comparing BvsC, NMA synthesizes both direct and indirect evidence to result in more precise estimates. The main assumption in NMA is that of transitivity, implying that the distribution of effect modifiers is similar across treatment comparisons. Despite the vast improvement in NMA methodology, there are still continuing controversies remaining. In this presentation, we will discuss many of the challenges that NMA scientists are facing including methods to evaluate its assumptions, synthesize randomized and non-randomized evidence, use of individual participant data, population adjustment methods and will also present some of the common mistakes and misconceptions that we see in published NMAs.

Teams link
(will follow in January)