Meta‐analysis of a continuous outcome combining individual patient data and aggregate data: a method based on simulated individual patient data

When some trials provide individual patient data (IPD) and the others provide only aggregate data (AD), meta‐analysis methods for combining IPD and AD are required. We propose a method that reconstructs the missing IPD for AD trials by a Bayesian sampling procedure and then applies an IPD meta‐analysis model to the mixture of simulated IPD and collected IPD. The method is applicable when a treatment effect can be assumed fixed across trials. We...