metafor (version 2.0-0)

dat.colditz1994: Studies on the Effectiveness of the BCG Vaccine Against Tuberculosis

Description

Results from 13 studies examining the effectiveness of the Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine against tuberculosis.

Usage

dat.colditz1994
dat.bcg

Arguments

Format

The data frame contains the following columns:

trial numeric trial number
author character author(s)
year numeric publication year
tpos numeric number of TB positive cases in the treated (vaccinated) group
tneg numeric number of TB negative cases in the treated (vaccinated) group
cpos numeric number of TB positive cases in the control (non-vaccinated) group
cneg numeric number of TB negative cases in the control (non-vaccinated) group
ablat numeric absolute latitude of the study location (in degrees)

Details

The 13 studies provide data in terms of \(2 \times 2\) tables in the form:

TB positive TB negative
vaccinated group tpos tneg

The goal of the meta-analysis was to examine the overall effectiveness of the BCG vaccine for preventing tuberculosis and to examine moderators that may potentially influence the size of the effect.

The dataset has been used in several publications to illustrate meta-analytic methods (see ‘References’).

References

Berkey, C. S., Hoaglin, D. C., Mosteller, F., & Colditz, G. A. (1995). A random-effects regression model for meta-analysis. Statistics in Medicine, 14, 395--411.

van Houwelingen, H. C., Arends, L. R., & Stijnen, T. (2002). Advanced methods in meta-analysis: Multivariate approach and meta-regression. Statistics in Medicine, 21, 589--624.

Viechtbauer, W. (2010). Conducting meta-analyses in R with the metafor package. Journal of Statistical Software, 36(3), 1--48. http://www.jstatsoft.org/v36/i03/.

Examples

Run this code
# NOT RUN {
### load BCG vaccine data
dat <- get(data(dat.bcg))

### calculate log risk ratios and corresponding sampling variances
dat <- escalc(measure="RR", ai=tpos, bi=tneg, ci=cpos, di=cneg, data=dat.bcg)
dat

### random-effects model
res <- rma(yi, vi, data=dat)
res

### average risk ratio with 95% CI
predict(res, transf=exp)

### mixed-effects model with absolute latitude and publication year as moderators
res <- rma(yi, vi, mods = ~ ablat + year, data=dat)
res

### predicted average risk ratios for 10-60 degrees absolute latitude
### holding the publication year constant at 1970
predict(res, newmods=cbind(seq(from=10, to=60, by=10), 1970), transf=exp)

### note: the interpretation of the results is difficult because absolute
### latitude and publication year are strongly correlated (the more recent
### studies were conducted closer to the equator)
plot(dat$ablat, dat$year)
cor(dat$ablat, dat$year)
# }

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