Hello,
I am trying to figure out how to perform a meta-analysis of diagnostic test accuracy studies and I have a doubt that is driving me crazy. I am using the package mada written in R and following the article “Meta-Analysis of Diagnostic Accuracy with mada”.
My doubt is related to the bivariate meta-regression. The article presents an example comparing two subsets of data to investigate the efficacy of self-administered and interviewer-administered questionnaires. They used the factor type (SAQ or IAQ) as a covariate in diagnostic meta-regression and presented the output obtained:
According to the article, the z-value for the regression coefficient for the sensitivities is significant while the point estimate for the false-positive rates does not indicate any effect. However, I couldn’t conclude the same by looking at the output and I don’t know how to interpret it properly. The p-value for tsens.typeSAQ was 0.066 while for tfpr.typeSAQ it was 0.023. Doesn’t it indicate the exact opposite of what the article concluded? Wouldn’t the correct interpretation be that a significant difference was observed for the false-positive rates, but not for sensitivities (considering a significance level of 0.05)?
I am not really good with statistic and this doubt may seem trivial, but I’ve been trying to understand it for a while without success.
Thank you very much!
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