Network meta-analyses in clinical practice guidelines: A cross-sectional survey

Tags: Poster
Yan PJ1, Yang KH2, Yao L1
1Gansu Provincial Hospital, 2Evidence-Based Medicine Center of Lanzhou University, Lanzhou University

Background: The development of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) should base on systematic reviews. Network meta-analyses (NMAs) are useful in CPGs when there is no evidence directly comparing interventions of interest (indirect treatment comparison; ITC), or when combining direct and indirect evidence (multiple treatment comparison; MTC).

Objectives: To analyse the proportion of NMAs used in CPGs.

Methods:PubMed database were searched to obtain NMAs, and of which 100 NMAs were randomly selected as the sample by SPSS 19.0. Then we collected the articles which cited the NMAs sample in Google and Web of Science.

Results: A total of 289 NMAs were retrieved from PubMed, and 100 NMAs were sampled randomly. 2026 articles had cited the NMAs sample, among which 50 (2%) were CPGs, including 12 NGC CPGs and 2 NICE CPGs. And all of the CPGs cited NMAs were conducted or updated in 2011~2013.

Conclusions: The value of NMAs could make explicit the decisions made implicitly when multiple pairwise comparisons are presented in CPGs. However, low proportion of NMAs were used in CPGs. Further research on how to improve NMAs use in CPGs would be valuable.