Investigating the assumption of homogeneity of treatment effects in clincal studies with application to meta-analysis

Julious, Steven and Whitehead, Anne (2012) Investigating the assumption of homogeneity of treatment effects in clincal studies with application to meta-analysis. Pharmaceutical Statistics, 11 (1). pp. 49-56. ISSN 1539-1604

Abstract

An important part of the evaluation of a therapy is an investigation of the assumption of homogeneity of its effect across pre-defined subpopulations. In this paper we describe simple graphical presentations that could be used to assess the homogeneity of treatment effect and identify outliers. The emphasis in the paper is on meta-analysis but the methods described can be generalized to other investigations.