Individual Participant Data Meta-Analysis: A Handbook for Healthcare Research

Split into five parts, the book chapters take the reader through the journey from initiating and planning IPD projects to obtaining, checking, and meta-analysing IPD, and appraising and reporting findings. The book initially focuses on the synthesis of IPD from randomised trials to evaluate treatment effects, including the evaluation of participant-level effect modifiers (treatment-covariate interactions). Detailed extension is then made to specialist topics such as diagnostic test accuracy, prognostic factors, risk prediction models, and advanced statistical topics such as multivariate and network meta-analysis, power calculations, and missing data.

Intended for a broad audience, the book will enable the reader to:

• Understand the advantages of the IPD approach and decide when it is needed over a conventional systematic review
• Recognise the scope, resources and challenges of IPD meta-analysis projects
• Appreciate the importance of a multi-disciplinary project team and close collaboration with the original study investigators
• Understand how to obtain, check, manage and harmonise IPD from multiple studies
• Examine risk of bias (quality) of IPD and minimise potential biases throughout the project
• Understand fundamental statistical methods for IPD meta-analysis, including two-stage and one-stage approaches (and their differences), and statistical software to implement them
• Clearly report and disseminate IPD meta-analyses to inform policy, practice and future research
• Critically appraise existing IPD meta-analysis projects
• Address specialist topics such as effect modification, multiple correlated outcomes, multiple treatment comparisons, non-linear relationships, test accuracy at multiple thresholds, multiple imputation, and developing and validating clinical prediction models