In her doctoral dissertation, Laura Koopman analyzes the applicability of special kinds of meta-analyses, namely meta-analyses that use original, individual patient data (IPD) from intervention studies (known as IPD meta-analyses).
Such analyses make it possible to study an intervention’s effectiveness in subgroups of patients. Using the example of a meta-analysis of the individual data of 1,643 children from six large clinical trials into the effectiveness of antibiotics in ear infection, Koopman argues that the subgroup effects of an IPD meta-analysis are more accurate and more reliable.
Meta-analyses pool and reanalyze the published findings of comparable clinical studies. Although this leads to a more accurate assessment of the average effectiveness of a specific intervention, doctors do not actually see “average” patients.
Laura Koopman will receive her PhD on January 31 from Utrecht University. The title of her dissertation is “Pooling of Individual Patient Data from Clinical Trials. Improvement of analyses of subgroups.”