A Primer on Network Meta-Analysis for Dental Research

Abstract EN

In the last decade, a new statistical methodology, namely, network meta-analysis, has been developed to address limitations in traditional pairwise meta-analysis.

Network meta-analysis incorporates all available evidence into a general statistical framework for comparisons of all available treatments.

A further development in the network meta-analysis is to use a Bayesian statistical approach, which provides a more flexible modelling framework to take into account heterogeneity in the evidence and complexity in the data structure.

The aim of this paper is therefore to provide a nontechnical introduction to network meta-analysis for dental research community and raise the awareness of it.

An example was used to demonstrate how to conduct a network meta-analysis and the differences between it and traditional meta-analysis.

The statistical theory behind network meta-analysis is nevertheless complex, so we strongly encourage close collaboration between dental researchers and experienced statisticians when planning and conducting a network meta-analysis.

The use of more sophisticated statistical approaches such as network meta-analysis will improve the efficiency in comparing the effectiveness between multiple treatments across a set of trials.