Predictive P-score for treatment ranking in Bayesian network meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Network meta-analysis (NMA) is a widely used tool to compare multiple treatments by synthesizing different sources of evidence. Measures such as the surface under the cumulative ranking curve (SUCRA) and the P-score are increasingly used to quantify treatment ranking. They provide summary scores of treatments among the existing studies in an NMA. Clinicians are frequently interested in applying such evidence from the NMA to decision-making in the future. This prediction process needs to account for the heterogeneity between the existing studies in the NMA and a future study. METHODS: This article introduces the predictive P-score for informing treatment ranking in a future study via Bayesian models. Two NMAs were used to illustrate the proposed measure; the first assessed 4 treatment strategies for smoking cessation, and the second assessed treatments for all-grade treatment-related adverse events. For all treatments in both NMAs, we obtained their conventional frequentist P-scores, Bayesian P-scores, and predictive P-scores. RESULTS: In the two examples, the Bayesian P-scores were nearly identical to the corresponding frequentist P-scores for most treatments, while noticeable differences existed for some treatments, likely owing to the different assumptions made by the frequentist and Bayesian NMA models. Compared with the P-scores, the predictive P-scores generally had a trend to converge toward a common value of 0.5 due to the heterogeneity. The predictive P-scores’ numerical estimates and the associated plots of posterior distributions provided an intuitive way for clinicians to appraise treatments for new patients in a future study. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed approach adapts the existing frequentist P-score to the Bayesian framework. The predictive P-score can help inform medical decision-making in future studies. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12874-021-01397-5.