Healthcare Research Applications in Meta-Analysis: A Review

Abstract

Every new day comes up with different challenges in the healthcare sector in developing countries like ours. So this review article tells us the role of meta-analysis in current healthcare share and current health problems dealing with ‘Evidence-Based Medicine Practices’. This article is a combination of healthcare practices and meta-analysis in the field of medicine. Consideration of current trends and scenarios demonstrates a consistent increase in the use of meta-analysis, especially in randomized controlled trials and interventional studies. Meta-analyses look for new information in existing data. Comparing the results of meta-analyses with subsequent findings from large-scale, well-conducted, randomized controlled trials (so-called RCTs) is one way to assess the validity of this new knowledge. Such comparisons have yielded mixed findings thus far, with good agreement in the majority of cases but notable inconsistencies in others. One such exercise, for example, resulted in the publication of a paper titled "Lessons from a "successful, safe, simple intervention" that wasn't" misleading meta-analysis (use of metformin after diabetes mellitus). The inadequacies in meta-analyses that have been later challenged by data from RCTs can often be discovered with the benefit of hindsight. So this article directly or indirectly helps researchers to adopt new knowledge in Meta-analysis, especially for current healthcare practice. We can’t separate them as healthcare and meta-analysis both are two sides of the same coin.