Causal Perspectives on Network Meta-Analysis
网络元分析的因果视角
Pairwise and network meta-analyses occupy the highest tier of evidence-based medicine and routinely inform clinical guidelines and healthcare decision-making. Current approaches typically aggregate study-level treatment effects to obtain an overall estimate. We argue that the causal estimand should come first, with the aggregation derived only afterwards: the target population and the relevant sources of between-study heterogeneity should be explicitly defined before…