Both individual studies and meta-analyses of published results have come to differing conclusions.
Our findings confirm previous research, both individual studies and summary estimates, of the U-shaped relationship between average alcohol consumption and risk of diabetes in both men and women.
If the MID has been established for two or more instruments, systematic review authors could report the results of each study in "MID units" instead of SD units (for both individual studies and pooled effects).
The contribution of supplements to micronutrient intake has been investigated in the past works in both individual studies and the national survey data, but this is the first time, to our knowledge, where attempts have been made to bring together data from a number of countries to compare the contribution of supplements with the mean and lower percentiles of the intake distributions.
It is noteworthy that both individual studies were relatively small and that the largest single study in this analysis (with a sample size over 6-fold greater than the combined sample size of the two previous studies with presence of effect modification) had the largest P-value for interaction.
The results of a meta-analysis are usually presented in a complex figure, known as a forest plot, which shows both the individual studies and the summary statistics.
The frequent presence of such dissonance, both within individual studies and the evidence as a whole, reflected the quality of the included studies and the depth of the evidence.
To determine the time lag to benefit, we calculated the time at which specific thresholds of absolute risk reduction (1 10 000, 1 5000, 1 2000, 1 1000, 1 500) were crossed for each MCMC simulation (both in individual studies and overall for the meta-analysis).
Improvements in the adjusted mean trough FEV1 with tiotropium+olodaterol FDC 5/5 µg and 2.5/5 µg over the corresponding individual components in both the individual studies and the combined data were statistically significant (p<0.05 for all comparisons) (table 2, and table S3 in the online supplementary material).
