Mixed treatment comparison (MTC) (also called network meta-analysis) is an extension of traditional meta-analysis to allow the simultaneous pooling of data from clinical trials comparing more than two treatment options. Typically, MTCs are performed using general-purpose Markov chain Monte Carlo software such as WinBUGS, requiring a model and data to be specified using a specific syntax. It wou...

Inconsistency can be thought of as a conflict between "direct" evidence on a comparison between treatments B and C and "indirect" evidence gained from AC and AB trials. Like heterogeneity, inconsistency is caused by effect modifiers and specifically by an imbalance in the distribution of effect modifiers in the direct and indirect evidence. Defining inconsistency as a property of loops of evide...

BACKGROUND Assessing agreement in method comparison studies depends on two fundamentally important components; validity (the between method agreement) and reproducibility (the within method agreement). The Bland-Altman limits of agreement technique is one of the favoured approaches in medical literature for assessing between method validity. However, few researchers have adopted this approach f...

Several "genetic" item-response theory (IRT) models are fitted to the responses of 1086 adolescent female twins to the 33 multi-category item Mood and Feeling Questionnaire relating to depressive symptomatology in adolescence. A Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is used within a Bayesian framework for inference using Gibbs sampling, implemented in the program WinBUGS 1.4. The final mode...

OBJECTIVE To study the relationship between the risk of dengue and sociodemographic variables through the use of spatial regression models fully Bayesian in the municipalities of Espírito Santo in 2010. METHOD This is an ecological study and exploration that used spatial analysis tools in preparing thematic maps with data obtained from SinanNet. An analysis by area, taking as unit the municip...

Network meta-analysis (NMA) combines direct and indirect evidence from trials to calculate and rank treatment estimates. While modelling approaches for continuous and binary outcomes are relatively well developed, less work has been done with time-to-event outcomes. Such outcomes are usually analysed using Cox proportional hazard (PH) models. However, in oncology with longer follow-up time, and...

INTRODUCTION Colonoscopy has been regarded as a standard method of detecting and removing gastrointestinal lesions early, while adequate bowel preparation is the prerequisite of determining the diagnostic accuracy and treatment safety of this process. Polyethylene glycol (PEG) based bowel preparation regimens remain the first recommendation, but the optimal option is still uncertain. The aim of...

One of the most popular paradigms to use for studying human reasoning involves the Wason card selection task. In this task, the participant is presented with four cards and a conditional rule (e.g., "If there is an A on one side of the card, there is always a 2 on the other side"). Participants are asked which cards should be turned to verify whether or not the rule holds. In this simple task, ...

BACKGROUND On account of deterioration of chronic heart failure (CHF) and extensive exploration of Chinese herbal injections (CHIs), we performed a network meta-analysis to investigate the efficacy of CHIs (Huangqi injection, Shenfu injection, Shengmai injection, Shenmai injection, Shenqi Fuzheng injection, Yiqifumai injection) on the basis of western medicine (WM) treatment in CHF. METHODS L...

Standard regression analyses are often plagued with problems encountered when one tries to make inference going beyond main effects using data sets that contain dozens of variables that are potentially correlated. This situation arises, for example, in epidemiology where surveys or study questionnaires consisting of a large number of questions yield a potentially unwieldy set of interrelated da...