Answering complex hierarchy questions in network meta-analysis

Network meta-analysis estimates all relative effects between competing treatments and can produce a treatment hierarchy from the most to the least desirable option according to a health outcome. While about half of the published network meta-analyses present such a hierarchy, it is rarely the case that it is related to a clinically relevant decision question.

This Cochrane Learning Live webinar presented a stepwise approach to express clinically relevant decision questions as hierarchy questions and quantify the uncertainty of the criteria that constitute them. The approach to using the R package nmarank, available in CRAN was demonstrated.

This session was aimed at anyone interested in undertaking a systematic review that includes a network meta-analysis and was delivered in November 2022. It consisted of a presentation and a live demo of implementing the method in R followed by a Q&A. Below you will find the videos from the webinar together with accompanying slides to download [PDF].

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Presenter Bio

Adriani Nikolakopoulou is a statistician based at the Institute of Medical Biometry and Statistics at the University of Freiburg in Germany. She is working on developing methodology for meta-analysis.