Fig. 1

Network meta-analysis and assessment of the exchangeability assumption. Panel a presents a network meta-analysis assessing whether the exchangeability assumption holds for studies comparing treatments c versus a and treatments b versus a. Panel b presents a table comparing the patient and study characteristics for these two studies. Panel c assesses and plots the baseline risk of the common comparator (treatment A) for both studies and the combined result using a box plot. We have compared patient and study characteristics at the pair-wise comparison level (e.g., a versus b) although they can also be conducted at the treatment level (e.g., a, b, and c)