Meta-analysis: the way forward in medical discovery

Abstract

The increasing volume of information published in biomedical literatures poses an enormous challenge to evidence-based health care and scientific discoveries. It is common for important issues in medical research to be addressed in several studies. The idea of summarizing a set of studies is not new in medical literature; review articles have long had an important role in helping practitioners keep up to date and make sense of the many studies on any given topic. Meta analysis goes a step further by using statistical procedures to combine the results of several studies