The growing trend of indirect comparisons meta-analyses topic appearance in medical literature

A. CIAPPONI

Quebec

Conferencia; XXI Cochrane Colloquium. Better Knowledge for Better Health; 2013

Cochrane

Background: Frequently, interventions for a given health problem have never been compared in head-to-head randomized controlled trials. In this context, adjusted indirect comparisons based on network meta-analyses (NMAs) could answer the question posed by most healthcare professionals: what is the best intervention among the existing interventions for a specific condition? Objectives: To evaluate the trend in NMAs publication topic in medical electronic databases and in the top five impact factor journals in the ?Medicine, General and Internal? category. Methods: A search strategy was performed in Medline (PubMed), EMBASE, and CENTRAL, since inception (Figure 1). We analysed the general yearly trend all together and separately by database and by journal. Results: During the analysed period, the reporting of studies mentioning NMA has increased since the beginning of the XXI century and markedly since 2009. EMBASE was the database with the highest cumulative number of references bout NMA and the most manifest increasing trend, while CENTRAL showed a more steady increasing trend (Figure 1). The most important sources of NMA topic reports are presented in Table 1. The Lancet was the only one among the top-five impact-factor journal in ?Medicine, General and Internal? category (1) that ranked in the first 10 sources that published about NMA. The other four top-five impact-factor journals published a lower number of articles: NEJM, Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, and Plos Medicine. Conclusions: Although the relevance of our search strategy was not validated, this study showed a growing report of NMA topics in medical literature, probably reflecting the absence of head-to-head comparisons to identify the best interventions for specific conditions. This trend was not observed among the top-five journals. 1. The Cochrane Library Impact Factor Data Pack ? July 2011 http://www.editorial-unit.cochrane.org/sites/editorial-unit.cochrane.org/files/uploads/Impact_factor_report_2010.pdf Accessed 25/3.2013