22 We tested the hypothesis that industry sponsorship bias would occur when a pharmaceutical sponsor favoured its own product in placebo controlled or active comparator trials, or the highest dose of its own drug in a trial comparing multiple doses.
26 This approach will be used to integrate direct evidence (from studies directly comparing interventions) with indirect evidence (information about two treatments derived via a common comparator) from multiple treatment comparisons to estimate the interrelations across all treatments.
For these reasons, a better-designed approach utilising Bayesian network meta-analysis is urgently needed in this area, integrating direct evidence (from studies directly comparing interventions) with indirect evidence (information about two treatments derived via a common comparator) from multiple treatment comparisons to estimate the interrelations across all treatments.
Consensus sequences were thus created from sequences having identical BLASTX hits in the three comparators, allowing multiple consensus sequences for a single HGG.
This was a randomized, double-blind, placebo- and active-comparator-controlled, multiple-dose study performed under in-house blinding in patients undergoing unilateral total knee replacement surgery to evaluate the tolerability and efficacy of etoricoxib.
If there were multiple comparator interventions, minimal acupuncture or sham acupuncture was selected over a non-acupuncture control, and minimal acupuncture over sham acupuncture.
A weighted average was applied within studies to combine multiple comparator arms.
Only RCTs meeting the search criteria were included in the MTC network analysis of fluconazole, itraconazole, posaconazole, and voriconazole if they included a comparator common to multiple RCTs.
For example, physiotherapy was selected as the comparator for the multiple sclerosis drug fampridine [ 7] despite a lack of evidence from clinical trials that physiotherapy offers a statistically significant benefit.
