{"id":130,"date":"2019-07-10T09:41:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-10T07:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lpinstitute.dev.onpressidium.com\/news\/5d9b2486f8c90ab146afbd8a\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T22:44:21","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T21:44:21","slug":"new-publication-fragility-of-meta-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.learningplanetinstitute.org\/en\/news\/nouvelle-publication-fragilite-des-meta-analyses\/","title":{"rendered":"New publication - Fragility of meta-analyses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A new study by Ignacio Atal, long-term researcher at CRI Research, and collaborators at H\u00f4pital H\u00f4tel-Dieu, has just been published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. It shows how the statistical significance of meta-analyses can be fragile if single events in the studies included in the meta-analysis are altered.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\"><img alt decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.learningplanetinstitute.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/0c96d621-e5e6-4636-b9d5-9e4e18c03339.png\" class=\"aligncenter full-size wp-image-1334\" loading =\"lazy\"><\/figure>\n<p>The full text of the study is available <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jclinepi.com\/article\/S0895-4356(18)30818-7\/fulltext\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\"><u>here<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Meta-analyses inform clinical practice by summarizing the effect of a treatment from the results of several trials. However, the statistical significance of such a meta-analysis may rely on the results of only a few patients from the specific trials included. The study assesses this effect by defining the meta-analysis fragility index, simply a minimum number of changes in patient outcome (e.g. cured or not cured) that would alter the study's conclusions. Among the 906 meta-analyses reviewed, the median fragility index was 12, but for around 30 % of the studies, it was 5 or less. This indicates an overall fragility of the meta-analysis results in the face of small changes in the specific studies considered.<\/p>\n<p>The authors have also created a <a href=\"http:\/\/clinicalepidemio.fr\/fragility_ma\/\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\"><u>website<\/u><\/a> which allows other scientists to assess the fragility of their meta-analyses.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new study by Ignacio Atal, a Long-term Fellow at CRI Research.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[21],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rd","tag-publication"],"acf":[],"meta_box":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningplanetinstitute.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningplanetinstitute.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningplanetinstitute.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningplanetinstitute.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningplanetinstitute.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningplanetinstitute.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningplanetinstitute.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningplanetinstitute.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningplanetinstitute.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningplanetinstitute.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}