Background
Treatment of hand OA aims to reduce pain, functional disability, and to optimize hand function. There are many ways to treat hand OA. But so far it is unclear which therapies (conservative, pharmacological and surgical) are most beneficial. Earlier RCTs found discrepancies in the effect of different interventions on pain and physical function. Finding the most effective treatment options, and if possible identify subgroups of patients that are responsive to specific interventions for hand OA will help future clinical decision making. Therefore, by collecting individual patient data (IPD) from existing RCTs, this project aims to identify the most effective treatment options for hand OA, if possible by identifying subgroups of patients that will most benefit from certain strategies. This could be an approach to individualized patient care to improve treatment and patient outcomes.
Methods
IPD will be retrieved from published RCTs on conservative, pharmacological and surgical treatments of hand OA to conduct meta-analyses. Our primary outcome is pain, and our secondary outcomes are patient reported outcome measures as DASH, MHQ, FIHOA, but not exclusive. Possible subgroups include age, sex, BMI, hypermobility and other comorbidities, occupation, radiological severity of OA, duration of symptoms and affected joint(s).
A two-stage approach of IPD analyses will be performed. In the first stage all IPD from each trial is analyzed separately to obtain aggregate data of effect estimates of interest. Then, in the second stage data is synthesized to produce summary meta-analysis results based on a random effect model.
Status
Data collection in process.