Application of Effective Diagnostic Methods For Meta-Analyzing The Effect of Albendazole In The Treatment of Patients With hookworm: A Systematic Study

Meta-analysis is the statistical analysis of a combination of independent studies which follow the same purposes. Presence of outlier and influencing samples may affect on the validity of a meta-ana-lysis. The present study was performed to investigate the presence of outlier and influence samples in a meta-analysis that evaluates the effect of Albendazole on the treatment of patients with hookworm.

The information of 15 clinical trial articles each containing of treatment and placebo groups، were evalua-ted. In this articles the effect of albendazole as a single oral dose (400 mg) for the treatment of hookworms were compared with placebo. Articles had been published between the years of 1983 to 2012. For each of the studies، the total number of participants، number of patients and impr-oved patients were recorded. Relative risk and its variance were calculated for each study and then the items were again extracted through the meta-analysis of the entire studies. To identify the outlier and influence regions، the residual methods including standardized deleted residuals، cooks distance dffits value and ratios of generalized variances were used and their charts were plotted. The R and STATA softwares were used for statistical analysis. Discussion &

Meta-Analysis showed that the estimated relative risk is equal to 1. 74 with confidence intervals 1. 61 and 1. 89. All applied statistical methods showed that of the studies، 2 researches were identified as outlier and were assigned on the charts