ObjectiveTo explore the prevalence and risk factors of hypertension and diabetes in floating population in Hubei province, so as to provide reference for the prevention of chronic disease of floating population. MethodA multi-stages sampling was performed among six counties in Hubei province in 2012, according to the different occupations. A questionnaire survey was conducted to collect the demography, sociology and health-related behavioral characteristics of subjects. Then a univariate analysis and a multivariate analysis were conducted by SPSS 20.0 software. ResultsA total of 1 800 individuals were surveyed, and the prevalence of hypertension and diabetes in floating population was 22.7% and 4.9%, respectively. Univariate analysis indicated that significant associations were found between hypertension and such factors as age, occupations, smoking and life satisfaction (all P values < 0.05); and significant associations were found between diabetes and such factors as occupations, educational level and BMI (all P values < 0.05). The results of further logistic regression analysis showed that age (OR=2.194, 95% CI 1.940 to 2.483, P=0.001) and life satisfaction (OR=0.291, 95% CI 0.248 to 0.341, P=0.002) were independent risk factors of hypertension, and educational level (OR=3.219, 95%CI 2.016 to 7.565, P=0.011) and gender (OR=0.568, 95% CI 0.323 to 0.999, P=0.049) were independent risk factors of diabetes. ConclusionsThe prevalence of hypertension and diabetes are relative high in floating population of Hubei Province. Increasing age and low life satisfaction are independent risk factors of hypertension in floating population, while male and low educational level are independent risks factors of diabetes.
ITC (Indirect Treatment Comparison) software and indirect procedure of Stata software are especially used for indirect comparison nowadays, both of which possess the characteristics of friendly concise interface and support for menu operation. ITC software needs the application of other software to yield effect estimation and its confidence interval of direct comparison firstly; while Stata-indirect procedure can complete direct comparison internally and also operate using commands, which simplifies complicated process of indirect comparison. However, both of them only perform "single-pathway" of data transferring and pooling, which is a common deficiency. From the results, their results are of high-degree similarity.
R software is a free and powerful statistical software, which has the functions of data processing and graphics drawing and is widely used in the meta-analysis. This article introduced detailed operation steps of rmeta package which is suitable for meta-analysis of binary data, and also can finish cumulative meta-analysis, draw standard summary plots, forest plot and funnel plot. In summary, the functions of rmeta package are simple and easy to mastery. There are some limitations of current version which need to be improved in the future.
As a valid method in systematic review, dose-response meta-analysis is widely used in investigating the relationship between independent variable and dependent variable, and which usually based on observational studies. With large sample size, observational studies can provide a reasonable amount of statistical power for meta-analysis. However, due to the design defects of observational studies, they tend to introduce many kinds of biases, which may influence the final results that make them deviation from the truth. Given the dead zone of methodology, there is no any bias adjusting method in dose-response meta-analysis. In this article, we will introduce some bias adjusting methods from other observational-study-based meta-analysis and make them suit for dose-response meta-analysis, and then compare the advantages and disadvantages of these methods.
ObjectiveTo develop reporting guideline for dose-response meta-analysis (DMA), so as to help Chinese authors to understand DMA better and to promote the reporting quality of DMA conducted by them. MethodPubMed, EMbase, The Cochrane Library, CNKI, and WanFang Data were searched from Jan 1st 2011 to Dec 30th 2015 to collect DMA papers published by Chinese authors. The number of these publications by years, whether and what kind of reporting guideline was used, and whether the DMA method claimed in these publications was correct were analysed. Then we drafted a checklist of items for reporting DMA, and organized a discussion meeting with experts from the fields of DMA, evidence-based medicine, clinical epidemiology, and clinicians to collect suggestions for revising the draft reporting guideline for DMA. ResultsOnly 33.73% of the publications clarified it is a DMA on the title and 48.02% of them reported risk of bias. Almost 38.49% of the publications didn't use any reporting guidelines. Fourteen of them claimed an incorrect use of methodology. We primarily took account for 47 potential items related to DMA based on our literature analysis results and existing reporting guidelines for other types of meta-analyses. After the discussion meeting with 6 experts, we revised the items, and finally the G-Dose checklist with 43 items for reporting DMA was developed. ConclusionThere is a lack of attention on reporting guidelines in Chinese authors and evidence suggests these authors may be at risk of incomplete understanding on reporting guidelines. It is strongly recommended to use reporting guidelines for DMA and other types of meta-analyses in Chinese authors.