title: Comparing meta-analyses for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
abstract: Evaluation of: Oppe M, Al M, Rutten-van Mölken M. Comparing methods of data synthesis. Re-estimating parameters of an existing probabilistic cost-effectiveness model. Pharmacoeconomics 29(3), 239-250 (2011). In the paper by Oppe et al., a cost-effectiveness analysis of alternative treatments for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), based on data from four different trials, is considered. The goal is to compare the usual (frequentist and Bayesian) fixed-effects (FE) and random-effects (RE) normal model for carrying out meta-analysis. Under RE and FE models, the meta-estimation of some quantities of interest for the disease are also carried out using three out of the four trials, and afterwards data from the fourth are incorporated into the meta-estimation. From these sequential estimators, some conclusions on the FE and RE procedures are drawn. Furthermore, as far as the cost-effectiveness is concerned, the main conclusion of the paper is that the Bayesian RE procedure overrides the Bayesian FE and frequentist methods for cost-effectiveness meta-analysis.
authors.affiliation: Department of Quantitative Methods, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Campus de Tafira, E-35017 Las Palmas de GC (Canary Islands), Spain.
authors.forename: Francisco-José
authors.initials: FJ
authors.lastname: Vázquez-Polo
authors.forename: Elías
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Moreno
authors.forename: Miguel-Angel
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Negrín
authors.forename: Francisco-Javier
authors.initials: FJ
authors.lastname: Girón
authors.forename: María-Lina
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Martínez