Pooling of Effect Estimates Obtained from Various Study Designs in Systematic Reviews of Public Health Interventions:A Bayesian Approach to Meta-Analysis

Lewis, Melissa Glenda and Guddattu, Vasudeva and Kamath, Asha and Biju, Seena and Noronha, Judith and Nayak, Baby and Nair, Sreekumaran N (2017) Pooling of Effect Estimates Obtained from Various Study Designs in Systematic Reviews of Public Health Interventions:A Bayesian Approach to Meta-Analysis. Clinical Epidemiology and Global Health, 5 (3). pp. 137-142.

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Abstract

Background: Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are gold standard in assessing the effectiveness of a clinical intervention because of their high int ernal validity. However, the same does not hold true for interventions conducted at the population level like public health interventions. Well -designed RCTs are not easy to conduct at population level. Similarly, well planned, high - quality non - RCTs or obs ervational studies can complement RCTs. Because of this, several systematic reviews of public health interventions are assessed with other study designs, namely non - RCTs and observational studies. In such situations, studies of similar study design are pooled together to obtain an overall effect estimate. This is inevitable, because the principle of meta -analysis does not offer an op portunity for combining effect estimates coming from various study designs. If the meta analysis performed for each study design provides contrasting results, then this introduces a quandary for the decision makers and public health policy makers to call for a decision.Objective: The present study aims to integrate the results coming from a variety of study designs in order to obtain a single estimate of effect of intervention.Methodology;Bayesian approach to meta -analysis was used by formulating prior distribution from observational studies or non-RCTs and likelihood function from RCTs. Five systematic reviews of public health intervention were used to demonstrate the methodology. Results/conclusions:By formulating prior distribution from observational studies, the posterior estimates were found to be different than that from the results of RCTs or other study designs. The posterior pooled -estimate was found to be precise and the width of the credible interval narrowed. Inclusion of the relevant observational studies (or non-RCTs) in the systematic review is a potential advantage for evaluating the effectiveness of public health intervention

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Public Health Interventions ; Randomised Controlled Trials Observational Studies ;Non-Randomised Controlled Trials Bayesian Meta-Analysis
Subjects:	?? Healthcare_Management ??
Divisions:	Health care Management
Depositing User:	Mr. Muralidhara D
Date Deposited:	12 Sep 2018 10:58
Last Modified:	25 Feb 2019 11:00
URI:	http://tapmi.informaticsglobal.com/id/eprint/76

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