Dear all,
I try to figure out how the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ (CTT) Collaboration calculated their meta-analysis but I have some trouble to reproduce the results.
According to the Baseline characteristics table and Figure 1 of the paper (Lancet. 2010 Nov 13;376(9753):1670-81.):
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21 trials comparing statin with control were analyzed
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the median follow-up was 4.8 years
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the number of events / patients in the control group was 8934 / 64 782
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the number of events / patients in the statin group was 7136/64 744
Dividing the number of events by the number of patients per group leads me to an event rate of 11.02% and 13.79% for the control and statin group, respectively.
Maybe it is naïve (assuming a continuous and linear relationship between event occurrence and time), but I then divided these rates by the median follow-up of 4.8, leading to event rates per anno of 2.87% and 2.30%, respectively.
However, the authors depicted per anno rates of 3.6% and 2.8%, respectively.
Moreover, the unweighted risk ratio calculated based on the above-mentioned numbers is 0.80 and not 0.78 as the depicted subtotal treatment effect in Figure 1.
Most likely, I am just naïve and my statistical calculations are wrong. Therefore, I would be happy to get some expert support/guidance here!
In the slide deck provided on the CCT website, the authors present the 5-year risk of an event. Is it possible to calculate this measure based on the published data (without individual patient data)?
I am looking forward to your replies.