Resumen de Heterogeneity analysis on multicentre trials: application to early breast cancer

M. D. Jiménez, A. Muñoz, Víctor Alba

• Meta-analysis provides a framework for systematic and explicit processes of review and summation. It is widely used in clinical medicine since it allows to extract more powerful conclusions than that obtained from individual studies. An important issue in meta-analysis is which metric is appropriated to measure the effect of treatments or interventions. Another topic is how to analyze the heterogeneity of results. In this paper we analyze the heterogeneity of randomized trials within the breast cancer research for two set of trials that involve treatments with tamoxifen and polychemotherapy. In order to determine under which conditions the treatments produce an important reduction on mortality rates, we model the results for the risk dierence as a summary-measure.