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Meta-analysis for Rare Events in Clinical Trials

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Biopharmaceutical Applied Statistics Symposium

Part of the book series: ICSA Book Series in Statistics ((ICSABSS))

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Abstract

Biopharmaceutical clinical trials are typically conducted globally with multi-center, multi-regional trials. Meta-analysis is a natural statistical method for combining the data from these trials to increase the reliability of statistical findings. Trials with rare events are not uncommon. This chapter presents an overview of meta-analysis to synthesize summary statistics from multiple clinical trials and then illustrate how to use R software to analyze clinical trials with rare events. we make use of the well-known Rosiglitazone meta-analysis data to illustrate the bias when classical meta-analysis methods are used for rare events and then introduce a R package gmeta for meta-analysis of rare events.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Work & Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA

    Ding-Geng Chen

  2. University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

    Ding-Geng Chen

  3. Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, 30458, USA

    Karl E. Peace

Authors
  1. Ding-Geng Chen
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  2. Karl E. Peace
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ding-Geng Chen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, Georgia, USA

    Karl E. Peace

  2. School of Social Work & Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

    Ding-Geng Chen

  3. Boston University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Sandeep Menon

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Chen, DG., Peace, K.E. (2018). Meta-analysis for Rare Events in Clinical Trials. In: Peace, K., Chen, DG., Menon, S. (eds) Biopharmaceutical Applied Statistics Symposium . ICSA Book Series in Statistics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7826-2_8

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