Statistical Heterogeneity in Oral Health Meta-Analyses.

Providing the summary effect size and its uncertainty, a prediction interval, and a measure of statistical heterogeneity constitute good reporting practices in meta-analyses. Popular statistical heterogeneity measures comprise the and statistics. However, researchers often rely unduly on the statistic, using naive categorizations to gauge the extent of heterogeneity, leading to misuses of the meta-analysis models, deficiencies in reporting, and misleading conclusions.

An empirical study on 209 networks of treatments revealed intransitivity to be common and multiple statistical tests suboptimal to assess transitivity.

Background: Transitivity assumption is the cornerstone of network meta-analysis (NMA). Investigating the plausibility of transitivity can unveil the credibility of NMA results. The commonness of transitivity was examined based on study dissimilarities regarding several study-level aggregate clinical and methodological characteristics reported in the systematic reviews.

Local inconsistency detection using the Kullback-Leibler divergence measure.

Background: The standard approach to local inconsistency assessment typically relies on testing the conflict between the direct and indirect evidence in selected treatment comparisons. However, statistical tests for inconsistency have low power and are subject to misinterpreting a p-value above the significance threshold as evidence of consistency.

Methods: We propose a simple framework to interpret local inconsistency based on the average Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) from approximating the direct with the corresponding indirect estimate and vice versa.

Investigating the associations between early labour onset symptoms and self-diagnosed labour onset in a cohort study of primiparas.

Objective: The early recognition of possible labour onset symptoms may be pivotal to identifying the beginning of early labour and are usually recognised by the birthing women themselves. The present study illustrates the interrelationship among five labour-onset symptoms and explores the association of these labour-onset symptoms with the self-diagnosed labour onset of primiparas.

Methods: A prospective cohort study on a sample of 69 primigravida in Giessen, Germany, expecting spontaneous onset of labour at term.