Blood pressure–lowering therapy reduces left ventricular mass, but the question of whether differences exist among drug classes has not been fully resolved. Our aim was to compare the effects of diuretics, -blockers, calcium channel blockers, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, and angiotensin receptor blockers on left ventricular mass regression in patients with hypertension on the basis...

Blood pressure–lowering therapy reduces left ventricular mass, but the question of whether differences exist among drug classes has not been fully resolved. Our aim was to compare the effects of diuretics, -blockers, calcium channel blockers, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, and angiotensin receptor blockers on left ventricular mass regression in patients with hypertension on the basis...

this study uses the data envelopment analysis (dea) to assess the progress/regression of decision-making units (dmus) having a two-stage structure‎. ‎the progress/regression of these dmu can be assessed in the first stage‎, ‎the second stage‎, ‎and the whole system‎. ‎in the first stage‎, ‎the progress/regression of bank branches in collecting resources and in the second stage their progress/re...

Biases in systematic reviews and meta-analyses may be examined in 'meta-epidemiological' studies, in which the influence of trial characteristics such as measures of study quality on treatment effect estimates is explored. Published studies to date have analysed data from collections of meta-analyses with binary outcomes, using logistic regression models that assume that there is no between- or...

In this paper, we formalize the application of multivariate meta-analysis and meta-regression to synthesize estimates of multi-parameter associations obtained from different studies. This modelling approach extends the standard two-stage analysis used to combine results across different sub-groups or populations. The most straightforward application is for the meta-analysis of non-linear relati...

OBJECTIVES We performed a systematic review and meta-regression analysis of randomized control trials to investigate the association between response to initial treatment and survival outcomes in patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma (MM). METHODS Response outcomes included complete response (CR) and the combined outcome of CR or very good partial response (VGPR), while survival outc...

Many meta-analyses combine results from only a small number of studies, a situation in which the between-study variance is imprecisely estimated when standard methods are applied. Bayesian meta-analysis allows incorporation of external evidence on heterogeneity, providing the potential for more robust inference on the effect size of interest. We present a method for performing Bayesian meta-ana...

OBJECTIVE To compare fertility-sparing therapies including oral progestogens, hysteroscopic resection (HR), and the levonorgestrel- releasing intrauterine system (LNG-IUS) in achieving disease regression, recurrence and live birth rate in well differentiate early-stage endometrial carcinoma (eEC) and complex atypical hyperplasia(CAH). STUDY DESIGN This was a meta-analysis of previous studies ...

Heart failure with normal ejection fraction (HFNEF) accounts for approximately 50% of heart failure (HF) cases. To establish the utility of brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) in differentiating HF-related severe dyspnea from non-HF-related acute dyspnea, we used an estimation formula (eF) that was obtained from a series of three meta-regressions. We selected 60 out of 2721 case-control and follow-...