What if there are relatively few studies?
We convened a one-day meeting of nine nationally-recognized experts on heterogeneity, and meta-regression. Prior to the meeting, the experts were sent a meeting agenda, goals and objectives including key questions, a document containing our common notation, a discussion of our preliminary simulation, and our preliminary bibliography. We asked the experts to suggest additional meta-regression references. The list of experts and items from the meeting are shown in Appendix A. During the meeting, four of the experts presented half-hour talks. The topics chosen spanned the different types of meta-regression approaches available: • Meta-analysis of multi-treatment studies 20 (presented by Dr. Vic Hasselblad) • Control rate meta-regression models 15, 21 (presented by Dr. Chris Schmid) • Bayesian meta-analysis 17 (presented by Dr. Thomas Louis) • Methodological challenges in meta-regression 10, 11 (presented by Dr. Jesse Berlin) The common notation and the preliminary simulation results were
