Dialysis Initiation and All-Cause Mortality Among Incident Adult Patients With Advanced CKD: A Meta-analysis With Bias Analysis
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rationale & ObjectivesDue to unmeasured confounding, observational studies have limitations when assessing whether dialysis initiation reduces mortality compared with conservative therapy among adults with advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD). We addressed this issue in this meta-analysis.Study DesignMeta-analysis with bias analysis for unmeasured confounding.Setting & Study PopulationAdults with stage 4 or 5 CKD who had initiated dialysis or conservative treatment.Selection Criteria for StudiesProspective or retrospective cohort studies comparing survival of dialysis versus conservatively managed patients were searched on MEDLINE and Embase from January 2009 to March 20, 2019.Data ExtractionHRs of all-cause mortality associated with dialysis initiation compared with conservative treatment.Analytical ApproachWe pooled HRs using a random-effects model. We estimated the percentage of effect sizes more protective than HRs of 0.80 and severity of unmeasured confounding that could reduce this percentage to only 10%. Subgroup analysis was performed for studies with only older patients (aged ≥ 65 years).Results12 studies were included that involved 16,609 dialysis patients and 3,691 conservatively managed patients. A random-effects model suggested that dialysis initiation was associated with a mean mortality HR of 0.47 (95% CI, 0.34-0.64), in which 92% (95% CI, 50%-100%) of the true effects were more protective than HRs of 0.80. To reduce the percentage of HRs < 0.80 to 10%, unmeasured confounder(s) would need to be associated with both dialysis initiation and mortality by relative risks of 4.05 (95% CI, 2.39-4.15), which is equivalent to shifting each study’s estimated HR by 2.31-fold (95% CI, 1.51-2.36). Restricting studies to include only older patients did not modify the results.LimitationsLimited number of studies and evidence on the absence of publication bias.ConclusionsOur findings suggest that dialysis initiation considerably reduces mortality among adults with advanced CKD. Future bias-adjusted meta-analyses need to assess outcomes beyond mortality. Due to unmeasured confounding, observational studies have limitations when assessing whether dialysis initiation reduces mortality compared with conservative therapy among adults with advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD). We addressed this issue in this meta-analysis. Meta-analysis with bias analysis for unmeasured confounding. Adults with stage 4 or 5 CKD who had initiated dialysis or conservative treatment. Prospective or retrospective cohort studies comparing survival of dialysis versus conservatively managed patients were searched on MEDLINE and Embase from January 2009 to March 20, 2019. HRs of all-cause mortality associated with dialysis initiation compared with conservative treatment. We pooled HRs using a random-effects model. We estimated the percentage of effect sizes more protective than HRs of 0.80 and severity of unmeasured confounding that could reduce this percentage to only 10%. Subgroup analysis was performed for studies with only older patients (aged ≥ 65 years). 12 studies were included that involved 16,609 dialysis patients and 3,691 conservatively managed patients. A random-effects model suggested that dialysis initiation was associated with a mean mortality HR of 0.47 (95% CI, 0.34-0.64), in which 92% (95% CI, 50%-100%) of the true effects were more protective than HRs of 0.80. To reduce the percentage of HRs < 0.80 to 10%, unmeasured confounder(s) would need to be associated with both dialysis initiation and mortality by relative risks of 4.05 (95% CI, 2.39-4.15), which is equivalent to shifting each study’s estimated HR by 2.31-fold (95% CI, 1.51-2.36). Restricting studies to include only older patients did not modify the results. Limited number of studies and evidence on the absence of publication bias. Our findings suggest that dialysis initiation considerably reduces mortality among adults with advanced CKD. Future bias-adjusted meta-analyses need to assess outcomes beyond mortality.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it