The L'Abbé plot is one of several graphs commonly used to display data visually in a meta-analysis of clinical trials that compare a treatment and a control intervention. It is basically a scatterplot of results of individual studies with the risk in the treatment group on the vertical axis and the risk in the control group on the horizontal axis. This plot was advocated in 1987 by Kristan L'Abbé and colleagues for visually showing variations in observed results across individual trials in meta-analysis. This entry briefly discusses meta-analysis before addressing the usefulness, limitations, and inappropriate uses of the L'Abbé plot.

Meta-Analysis

To understand what the L'Abbé plot is, it is necessary to have a discussion about meta-analysis. Briefly, meta-analysis is a statistical method to provide a summary ...

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