Passive smoking in the workplace: classical and Bayesian meta-analyses
✍ Scribed by B. J. Biggerstaff; R. L. Tweedie; K. L. Mengersen
- Publisher
- Springer-Verlag
- Year
- 1994
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 929 KB
- Volume
- 66
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0340-0131
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
There are currently several classical and Bayesian methods of meta-analysis available for combining epidemiological results We describe and compare these in a consistent framework, and apply them to published studies of the relative risk of lung cancer associated with exposure to environmental tobacco smoke in the workplace. We find that although all methods give reasonably similar combined estimates of relative risk of lung cancer associated with this exposure (none of which is significantly raised above unity, in either a frequentist or a Bayesian sense), the approximations arising from classical methods appear to be nonconservative and should be used with caution The Bayesian methods, which account more explicitly for possible inhomogeneity in studies, give slightly lower estimates again of relative risk and wider posterior credible intervals, indicating that inference from the non-Bayesian approaches might be optimistic.