Scientific article
English

Meta-analysis of single-arm survival studies: a distribution-free approach for estimating summary survival curves with random effects

Published inStatistics in medicine, vol. 33, no. 15, p. 2521-2537
Publication date2014-07-10
First online date2014-02-13
Abstract

In epidemiologic studies and clinical trials with time-dependent outcome (for instance death or disease progression), survival curves are used to describe the risk of the event over time. In meta-analyses of studies reporting a survival curve, the most informative finding is a summary survival curve. In this paper, we propose a method to obtain a distribution-free summary survival curve by expanding the product-limit estimator of survival for aggregated survival data. The extension of DerSimonian and Laird's methodology for multiple outcomes is applied to account for the between-study heterogeneity. Statistics I2 and H2 are used to quantify the impact of the heterogeneity in the published survival curves. A statistical test for between-strata comparison is proposed, with the aim to explore study-level factors potentially associated with survival. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated in a simulation study. Our approach is also applied to synthesize the survival of untreated patients with hepatocellular carcinoma from aggregate data of 27 studies and synthesize the graft survival of kidney transplant recipients from individual data from six hospitals.

Keywords
  • Meta-analysis
  • Random effects
  • Survival curves
  • Carcinoma, Hepatocellular / mortality
  • Computer Simulation
  • Data Interpretation, Statistical
  • Graft Survival
  • Humans
  • Kidney Transplantation / standards
  • Liver Neoplasms / mortality
  • Meta-Analysis as Topic
  • Models, Statistical
  • Survival Analysis
Citation (ISO format)
COMBESCURE, Christophe, FOUCHER, Yohann, JACKSON, Daniel. Meta-analysis of single-arm survival studies: a distribution-free approach for estimating summary survival curves with random effects. In: Statistics in medicine, 2014, vol. 33, n° 15, p. 2521–2537. doi: 10.1002/sim.6111
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Identifiers
Additional URL for this publicationhttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sim.6111
Journal ISSN0277-6715
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Creation04/10/2022 14:51:37
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Update23/11/2023 18:03:04
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