Evidence-based or evidence-biased medicine?
Professor Richard Riley, Professor of Biostatistics at Keele University, will give the next lecture in Keele's programme of Inaugural Professorial Lectures 2015-16, on Tuesday, 12 April, 2016, in the Westminster Theatre, Chancellor's Building, on the University campus. The title of his lecture is 'Evidence-based or evidence-biased medicine? Improving meta-analysis results for clinicians and patients'.
Medical decisions (such as the choice of treatment for a particular patient) should be based on all the available research evidence. Meta-analysis methods are crucial for this purpose, as they combine statistical results from multiple related studies to summarise their findings. This should lead to clear recommendations, for example, regarding the best treatment to use in particular situations. Unfortunately, existing research studies are often poorly reported, such that they omit (sometimes deliberately) the statistical results needed for meta-analysis.
In this situation, meta-analysis can only be performed on a (biased) subset of the evidence, which may lead to misleading results and subsequently incorrect medical decisions. This lecture will introduce the importance of meta-analysis through real medical examples, and illustrate how missing data can adversely affect meta-analysis conclusions. Novel meta-analysis approaches are then illustrated, which make more of the data available to reduce the impact of missing evidence, and thereby produce more reliable meta-analysis results for medical decision making.
Richard Riley is a Professor of Biostatistics at Keele University, within the Research Institute for Primary Care and Health Sciences, having previously held academic posts at the universities of Birmingham, Liverpool and Leicester. He specialises in the development of meta-analysis methods to inform medical decisions, especially in regard prognosis and risk prediction. He is also a Statistics Editor for the BMJ.
Keele's programme of Inaugural Lectures are given by newly established professors within the University and aim to give an illuminating account of the speaker's own subject specialism. The lectures, which start at 6 pm in the Westminster Theatre, are chaired by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Trevor McMillan.
This lecture is free and open to all.
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