Estimating the sample mean and standard deviation from commonly reported quantiles in meta-analysis

Details

• Alternative Title:
  Stat Methods Med Res
• Personal Author:
  McGrath, Sean ; Zhao, XiaoFei ; Steele, Russell ; Thombs, Brett D. ; Benedetti, Andrea
• Corporate Authors:
  DEPRESsion Screening Data (DEPRESSD) Collaboration
• Description:
  Researchers increasingly use meta-analysis to synthesize the results of several studies in order to estimate a common effect. When the outcome variable is continuous, standard meta-analytic approaches assume that the primary studies report the sample mean and standard deviation of the outcome. However, when the outcome is skewed, authors sometimes summarize the data by reporting the sample median and one or both of (i) the minimum and maximum values and (ii) the first and third quartiles, but do not report the mean or standard deviation. To include these studies in meta-analysis, several methods have been developed to estimate the sample mean and standard deviation from the reported summary data. A major limitation of these widely used methods is that they assume that the outcome distribution is normal, which is unlikely to be tenable for studies reporting medians. We propose two novel approaches to estimate the sample mean and standard deviation when data are suspected to be non-normal. Our simulation results and empirical assessments show that the proposed methods often perform better than the existing methods when applied to non-normal data.
• Subjects:
  Article First Quartile Maximum Value Median Meta-analysis Minimum Value Third Quartile
• Source:
  Stat Methods Med Res. 29(9):2520-2537
• Pubmed ID:
  32292115
• Pubmed Central ID:
  PMC7390706
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Funding:
  R36 HS018246/HS/AHRQ HHSUnited States/ ; R34 MH072925/MH/NIMH NIH HHSUnited States/ ; R01 MH069666/MH/NIMH NIH HHSUnited States/ ; R01 MH073687/MH/NIMH NIH HHSUnited States/ ; TL1 RR024135/RR/NCRR NIH HHSUnited States/ ; F30 MH096664/MH/NIMH NIH HHSUnited States/ ; R01 HD039415/HD/NICHD NIH HHSUnited States/ ; R49CE002093/ACL/ACL HHSUnited States/ ; R01 HL079235/HL/NHLBI NIH HHSUnited States/ ; R49 CE002093/CE/NCIPC CDC HHSUnited States/ ; R34 MH084673/MH/NIMH NIH HHSUnited States/ ; P30 DK050456/DK/NIDDK NIH HHSUnited States/ ; T37 MD001449/MD/NIMHD NIH HHSUnited States/ ; T32 GM007356/GM/NIGMS NIH HHSUnited States/ ; K02 MH065919/MH/NIMH NIH HHSUnited States/ ; R24 MH071604/MH/NIMH NIH HHSUnited States/
• Volume:
  29
• Issue:
  9
• Collection(s):
  CDC Public Access
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:da8db8210a110698910c997d97a4ed66e780d938219daaaa681ab12a0a317f1f
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/91324/cdc_91324_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 686.52 KB ]