Meta Analysis of Survival Benefit of Radiotherapy | Solution Library

Question

We will be conducting a meta-analysis to investigate whether surgery (cystectomy) combined with radiotherapy has a survival benefit (measured at 3-years) compared to radiotherapy alone for patients with bladder cancer.

Conduct a keyword search in (ovid) Medline (untick “Map Term to Subject Heading”) using the following search terms:

Bladder carcinoma

Radical radiotherapy

Preoperative radiotherapy

Radical cystectomy

Controlled trial

Combine these with an ‘and’ command. Present your search results in a table showing the number of studies found at each step.

Your search above should have found one study only. Extract the data from this study to be included in the meta-analysis. Hint: we want to look at 3 year survival comparing the two arms of the trial.
There were two other studies found that investigate three year survival, their results are shown in the following table:

Table1: Extracted data from two studies found via other searches

3 year survival Cystectomy Radiotherapy

Survived Total Survived Total

Miller 1977 18 35 7 32

Sell 1991 39 88 31 95

Calculate the study specific odds ratios comparing survival for cystectomy with survival for radiotherapy. Then calculate the Mantel-Haenszel pooled odds ratio.

Further analysis finds an I-squared = 0.0%. Is your analysis in part c) appropriate?
Interpret your pooled odds ratio from part c). A test was conducted to see if the pooled odds ratio is significantly different form 1 and this test has a p-value = 0.0011, use this information to help with your interpretation.

Summary

This question belongs to statistics and discusses about a meta-analysis to investigate whether surgery (cystectomy) combined with radiotherapy has a survival benefit (measured at 3-years) compared to radiotherapy alone for patients with bladder cancer.

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