dat.poole2003: Trials on Mucolytic Agents in Chronic Bronchitis or Chronic...

In metadat: Meta-Analysis Datasets

Trials on Mucolytic Agents in Chronic Bronchitis or Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Description

Results from 19 trials evaluating mucolytic agents in patients with chronic bronchitis or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Usage

dat.poole2003

Format

The data frame contains the following columns:

author	character	first author
year	integer	publication year
Ne	integer	sample size (mucolytic agents)
Me	numeric	mean exacerbations per months (mucolytic agents)
Se	numeric	standard deviation (mucolytic agents)
Nc	integer	sample size (placebo)
Mc	numeric	mean exacerbations per months (placebo)
Sc	numeric	standard deviation (placebo)
duration	character	study duration

Details

Poole and Black (2003) conducted a Cochrane review to evaluate mucolytic agents versus placebo for patients with chronic bronchitis or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The outcome used here is the mean number of acute exacerbations per month. Acute exacerbation is defined as an increase in cough and in the volume or purulence of sputum. All 17 studies included in the meta-analysis report a mean number of exacerbations and we can work with mean differences, rather than standardised mean differences. Note, later versions of this Cochrane review no longer evaluate the mean number of exacerbations per month.

This data set is used as an example in Schwarzer et al. (2015).

Concepts

medicine, pulmonology, raw mean differences, subgroup analysis

Author(s)

Guido Schwarzer, [e-mail], https://github.com/guido-s/

Source

Poole, P. J., & Black, P. N. (2003). Mucolytic agents for chronic bronchitis or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 1, CD001287. ⁠https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.cd001287⁠

References

Schwarzer, G., Carpenter, J. R., & Rücker, G. (2015). Meta-analysis with R. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

Examples

### Show first five studies
head(dat.poole2003, 5)

## Not run: 
### Load meta package
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(meta))

### Use RevMan 5 settings
oldset <- settings.meta("RevMan5",
  digits.I2 = 2, digits.tau = 3, digits.sd = 2)

### Conduct random effects meta-analysis
m <- metacont(Ne, Me, Se, Nc, Mc, Sc, data = dat.poole2003,
  studlab = paste(author, year), common = FALSE,
  subgroup = duration,
  subgroup.name = "Duration", sep.subgroup = ": ",
  label.e = "Mucolytic agent",
  label.c = "Placebo",
  label.left = "Favours mucolytic agent",
  label.right = "Favours placebo",
  col.label.left = "green", col.label.right = "red")

### Forest plot
forest(m, xlim = c(-0.5, 0.2),
  xlab = paste0("Difference in mean number of\n",
    "acute exacerbations per month"))

### Use previous settings
settings.meta(oldset)

## End(Not run)

metadat documentation built on April 29, 2026, 5:10 p.m.