A SURVEY OF CURRENT PROBLEMS IN METAANALYSIS - DISCUSSION FROM THE AGENCY FOR HEALTH-CARE POLICY AND RESEARCH INTER-PORT WORK GROUP ON LITERATURE-REVIEW METAANALYSIS

The United States Agency for Health Care Policy and Research brought t ogether representatives from each of the Patient Outcomes Research Tea ms (PORTs) as the Inter-PORT Meta-Analysis Work Group. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a wide range of problems the panel had enco untered in the area of meta-analysis. Several actual problems were pre sented, and tentative solutions to those problems were given. The PORT s had to consider issues such as quality assessment, survival analysis , rare events, sensitivity and specificity, and random effects models. The solutions presented represent the methods used by several researc hers who are active in the area of meta-analysis.