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Meta-analysis

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Please explain meta-analysis to me in layman's terms. Then, read the article below and provide a summary of the article and identify how meta-analysis was used in the study.

Jefferson, T., Smith, S., Demicheli, V., Harnden, A., Rivetti, A., & Di Pietrantonj, C. (2005). Assessment of the efficacy and effectiveness of influenza vaccines in healthy children: systematic review. The lancet, 365(9461), 773-780.

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The expert explains meta-analysis to me in Layman's terms.

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Meta-Analysis Guidelines
Meta analysis refers to the use of statistical techniques for combining the results of several individual studies. It supports researchers in enhancing the power of the analysis by allowing them to effectively use all the collected information. Additionally, it is also helpful to enhance the accuracy of the outcomes because by combining the results statistically, researchers can assess that whether outcomes are similar in similar situations (Mackey & Gass, 2011).

Summary of Article
Mainly, this article emphasizes to review evidence describing the annual incidence of influenza among healthy adults and healthcare workers (HCWs) in a systematic way. In order to conduct this study systematically, researchers have searched OVID MEDLINE (1950 to 2010), EMBASE (1947 to 2010) and reference lists of identified articles for identifying relevant studies related to the study (Kuster, et al., 2011). Along with this, observational studies that report full season or annual influenza infection rates for healthy, working age adult and HCWs were also included. There was a lack of direct comparative studies between HCWs and non-HCW adults and it is the reason that researchers generalized information related to influenza among studies and conducted a meta-analysis of rates. They defined influenza infection as a fourfold rise in antibody titer.

Further, in order to extract data independently from ...

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