New tools to select the right treatment

Abstract

We are fortunate to have several intramammary treatment products for clinical mastitis and dry-cow therapy available to us, but relatively few clinical trials compare these products head-to-head. Knowledge of relative efficacy of all available products is important for practitioners, where this information can be used to inform judicious antibiotic use. Network meta-analysis provides a method to synthesize evidence from all available trials and provide the relative efficacy of a network of treatments. This methodology is used extensively in human health and is becoming more common in animal health research.