Course Preparation and critical reading of meta-analysis

The course C229/11 Preparation and critical reading of meta-analysis is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, 2024.

Criteria for participation: University degree in medicine, dentistry, nursing, or Master’s degree in other fields and/or postgraduate research fellows (PhD students and research-year medical students). Participants must have installed Stata on computer before course.

Aim: The aim of the course is to give students the knowledge and the skills to carry out a meta-analysis. Meta- analyses are a prerequisite for a final compilation of results of several types of systematic reviews. Without this skill, it is impossible to finalize the review and interpret the results in order to provide a basis for clinical guidelines.

Learning outcomes: After the course, the students will have competence to:

• Carry out a meta-analysis based on the quantitative results of a systematic review, interpret the results and provide a clinical guideline based on the meta-analysis
• Describe the statistical assumptions, the chosen methods and the results of the meta-analysis
• Assess the quality of meta-analyses

Workload: The full workload of the course is expected to be 20 hours

Content: The students will gain skills to be able to:

• Extract the relevant data from the included scientific studies
• Assess the included studies’ quality and suitability of data in the meta-analysis
• Reason for choice of meta-analysis
• Choose the most appropriate type of estimation in relation to the assumptions for the meta-analysis
• Carry out the meta-analysis and prepare a forest plot with the relevant information
• Analyse and interpret the outcome of bias on the results
• Interpret the results of the meta-analysis

Instructors: Professor Inger Mechlenburg, Professor Carsten Juhl, Assistant professor Alessio Bricca

Venue: Aarhus University, Aarhus

Participation in the course is without cost for:

• PhD students, Health Research Year students from Aarhus University
• PhD students enrolled at partner universities of the Nordoc collaboration
• PhD students from other institutions in the open market agreement for PhD courses

Course dates:

• 19 February 2024 09:00 - 16:00
• 20 February 2024 09:00 - 16:00