ABSTRACT
Meta-analysis is a statistical technique that compares the effectiveness or safety of two treatments by incorporating the ndings from several independent studies (DerSimonian and Laird, 1986). Network meta-analysis (NMA), also sometimes referred to as multiple (or mixed) treatment comparisons (MTCs), is the extension of the traditional meta-analysis of two treatments to simultaneous incorporation of multiple treatments, where in most cases none of the studies compared all the treatments at one time. The goal of NMA is to address the comparative effectiveness or safety of interventions while accounting for all sources of data (Hoaglin et al., 2011; Jansen et al., 2011).
