Combining data types in meta analysis

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Over the past decade, meta analysis has come to play a key role in setting policy and also in planning new research. In gerontology, recent meta analyses have led to treatment recommendations or new insights in such areas as memory loss with normal aging, identifying, predicting, and treating Alzheimer's disease and dementia, depression in the elderly, perceptions of the elderly, disease prevention in the elderly, bone density loss and hip fractures, stroke, heart disease and aneurysms, and Parkinson's Disease, among many others. Under an earlier SBIR project, we developed a program for meta analysis. This program, Comprehensive Meta Analysis, is widely recognized as an exceptionally important resource for meta analysis. It is currently used by many government agencies, including the FDA and CDC, many of the major pharmaceutical companies, as well as thousands of universities, medical schools, and research organizations. In the current project, we will expand the program in four ways: We will add the ability to work with new classes of data, to accept data in additional formats, to display analyses using additional indices of effect size, and to include more than one class of data in the same analysis.