Is it sensible to consider meta-analysis the strongest level of evidence for or against an intervention?

[PaulBrownPhD]

@R_cubed

I haven’t seen this yet, but is anyone familiar with placing meta-analysis in a decision theoretic context, in terms of using Meta-analysis to produce informative priors for a later Bayesian experiment?

i was reading a bayes re-analysis yesterday that did this, it might not be the best example tho: bayes re-analysis, ECMO RCT. They say:

“data-derived prior distributions were developed based on relevant studies18-20 from a meta-analysis of ECMO for ARDS.21 The treatment effects in these previous studies were combined with the observed data from this trial in a Bayesian hierarchical random-effects model (that itself used minimally informative priors)”

they make too much of the convention of having artificial priors that are on the spectrum: enthusiastic - sceptical (shown in table 1). But i thinks this gets at the point you mention ie

@R_cubed

I think instead of looking at meta-analysis as “the answer”, it is better to look at it as “what is the range of scientifically justifiable difference of opinion?”