Meta-Analysis on the Effect of Tamiflu in Patients Infected with Flu in Some Areas around US and Asia

Flu infection is a deadly disease most especially in young children, older adults of 65+, pregnant women and people with weak immune system. Research in flu infection is an active research area. However, little have been said on the variability of effect size across studies and the between study variance (T2). This research work used Random effects model meta-analysis to analyze 2014 flu incidence estimates from Cochran e-Library using antiviral agents as the explanatory variables and the response variable is the incidence of the infection. The data was analyzed using the comprehensive meta-analysis version 3 software. The fitted model aims to describe the effect of Tamiflu in adults and The output of the results shows that the drug reduced the time to symptoms relief by a mean of -16.759hours with 95% confidence interval 25.1hours to 8.4hours, which tells us that the mean difference in the universe of studies could fall anywhere in this range. Hence, the range does not include a difference of zero, which tells us that the true mean difference is probably not zero. The z-value is -3.938 with a corresponding p-value less than 0.001, which represents a reduction in the mean time to relief of symptoms from 7 to 6 days. On average, across all relevant populations, the drug reduced the time to symptoms relief.