Antipsychotics for acute schizophrenia: Making choices

摘要

Conclusive assessment of the comparative efficacy and tolerability of medical treatments is important for patients, clinicians, families, health-care administrators, regulators, developers of treatment guidelines, and health-care funders. In view of the increasing number of randomised controlled trials in medicine, methods are needed to adequately integrate the available data. For many years, standard pairwise meta-analyses that pool effect sizes from individual studies have been used to summarise data and inform decision-making processes. The strength of these analyses is that directly observed effects are combined, overcoming issues of insufficient sample sizes, imprecise point estimates, outliers, and others.