metan forest plot formatting

[Adil Ahmad]

Hello,

As a novice Stata user I humbly seek insight from those more seasoned than myself with regards to a forest plot containing both subgroups and study names.

The plot displays the subgroup designation below the subgroups themselves (ex. Age is below the heading of age>65) as seen in the plot below.

My code is as follows:
metan logES logll logul, lcols(categoryb study) by(category) title (Subgroup Survival) favours(CDK inhibitor # placebo) randomi eform nooverall texts(200)

1. Is there an approach to move the main subgroup designation above the subgroups?
2. For visualization, since my forest plot is a tad crowded, does code exist to add space between each line of text in the forest plot?

Thank you kindly,
Adil

[David Fisher]

Dear Adil,

Firstly, apologies for replying to your post so late. I hope this will still be useful to you.

You have done an admirable job in creating such a clear forest plot using metan, considering your complex data structure. I recommend taking a look at (disclaimer: my own) alternative meta-analysis package, admetan (available from SSC). This has all the same functionality of metan, but crucially it allows you to save a dataset which corresponds to the layout of the forest plot. This means that you can move text around, add line gaps, and so on. Then you run the forestplot command (included with admetan) to re-draw the modified forest plot.

Best wishes,

David.