An overview of six clinical trials of aspirin in coronary heart disease.

Data from six randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials of aspirin, involving a total of 10,703 post-myocardial infarction patients, have been compared and combined. An apparent heterogeneity of findings among the six trials with respect to all-cause mortality is noted (P = 0.08). The reasons for this heterogeneity are explored. Two common methods of combining the results of several trials--the logrank and the log odds ratio methods--yield two-sided P-values of 0.112 and 0.110, respectively, for the aspirin-placebo effect on all-cause mortality. Alternative statistical methods of combining the results of the six trials give two-sided P-values ranging from 0.017 to 0.487.

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