A propensity score weighting approach to integrate aggregated data in random-effect individual-level data meta-analysis

Abstract: In evidence synthesis, collecting individual participant data (IPD) across eligible studies is the most reliable way to investigate the treatment effects in different subgroups defined by participant characteristics. Nonetheless, access to all IPD from all studies might be very challenging due to privacy concerns. To overcome this, many approaches such as multilevel modeling have been proposed to incorporate the vast amount of aggregated data from the literature into IPD meta-analysis. These methods, however, often rely on specifying separate models for trial-level versus patient-level data, which likely suffers from ecological bias when there are non-linearities in the outcome generating mechanism. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to combine aggregated data and IPD in meta-analysis that is free from ecological bias. The proposed approach relies on modeling the study membership given covariates, then using inverse weighting to estimate the trial-specific coefficients in the individual-level outcome model of studies without IPD accessible. The weights derived from this approach also shed insights on the similarity in the case-mix across studies, which is useful to assess whether eligible trials are sufficiently similar to be meta-analyzed. We evaluate the proposed method by synthetic data, then apply it to a real-world meta-analysis comparing the chance of response between guselkumab and adalimumab among patients with psoriasis.