Over the past week I’ve been working on a new method of rapid reviews, one based on FDA regulatory documents [1, 2, 3]. In pursuing the reviews and their development I had a conversation with Kamal Mahtani (Deputy Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine) who asked if the FDA documents contained the data to undertake a meta-analysis. Great question! But I had no idea as I’ve never undertaken a systematic review and I hadn’t been looking for the data. With the help of Erick Turner and a statistician colleague (thanks Mark) I located this table:
And from that I was able (via statistician Mark) to get these two meta-analyses undertaken:
The data was in such a format that to add this step might take the whole rapid review up to 60 minutes. So, I think a good idea would be to take my initial review on Brexpiprazole [1] and update/edit it with Erick’s feedback [3] and the meta-analysis added.
We might then have a reasonably robust systematic review and meta-analysis of Brexpiprazole undertaken in an hour.
References
Rapid-Reviews.info 