An overview of six clinical trials of aspirin in coronary heart disease.
Data from six randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials of aspirin, involving a total of 10,703 post-myocardial infarction patients, have been compared and combined. An apparent heterogeneity of findings among the six trials with respect to all-cause mortality is noted (P = 0.08). The reasons for this heterogeneity are explored. Two common methods of combining the results of several trials--the logrank and the log odds ratio methods--yield two-sided P-values of 0.112 and 0.110, respectively, for the aspirin-placebo effect on all-cause mortality. Alternative statistical methods of combining the results of the six trials give two-sided P-values ranging from 0.017 to 0.487.
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D001241:Aspirin / Q000627:therapeutic use*; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D006801:Humans; D009203:Myocardial Infarction / Q000401:mortality / Q000517:prevention & control*; D011897:Random Allocation; D012008:Recurrence; D012107:Research Design; D013223:Statistics as Topic / Q000379:methods
D001241:Aspirin