A Systematic Review of Obesity Disparities Research.

Context: A review of interventions addressing obesity disparities could reveal gaps in the literature and provide guidance on future research, particularly for populations with a high prevalence of obesity and obesity-related cardiometabolic risk.

Evidence Acquisition: A systematic review of clinical trials in obesity disparities research that were published in 2011-2016 in PubMed/MEDLINE resulted in 328 peer-reviewed articles. Articles were excluded if they had no BMI, weight, or body composition measure as primary outcome or were foreign (n=201); were epidemiologic or secondary data analyses of clinical trials (n=12); design or protocol papers (n=54); systematic reviews (n=3); or retracted or duplicates (n=9).

Estimation of a Matrix of Heterogeneity Parameters in Multivariate Meta-Analysis of Random-Effects Models.

Multivariate meta-analysis has potential over its univariate counterpart. The most common challenge in univariate or multivariate meta-analysis is estimating heterogeneity parameters in non-negative domains under the random-effects model assumption. In this context, two new multivariate estimation methods are demonstrated; first, by extending the Sidik and Jonkman (2005) univariate estimates to a multivariate setting, and second, by considering an iterative version of the Sidik and Jonkman method, namely, a method developed in Wouhib (2013).