[David Fisher]

I am in contact with Mark Ebell via email.

For the benefit other readers with similar issues: when Stata's user-created packages start misbehaving, there are various options. Sometimes, the approach suggested by Suhail Doi in the post immediately above works; that is, to force an install of the latest package, over-writing any conflicting files. The downside is that you cannot be sure exactly which files were conflicting, which were over-written, and which are now in use by Stata.

Therefore, a more comprehensive approach would be to identify all the relevant (user-created!!) packages which are causing issues, uninstall them all (creating a backup if necessary, e.g. if the packages are no longer available for download!), and re-install one by one. Tools for helping here include:

. ado dir                     // list all installed packages, with internal Stata ID numbers in square brackets; optionally restrict to a particular pkgname
. ado dir pkgname             // same but restricted to a particular pkgname
. which pkgname, all          // list all file locations and versions for a particular pkgname
. ado uninstall [x]           // uninstall the package with internal Stata ID number [x]  (including the square brackets, and where x is an integer)

Finally: this shouldn't really matter, but it might be advisable to install metan before installing ipdmetan, rather than the other way around.

I hope that helps!

David.

[Suhail Doi]

try

ssc install metan, replace

[Mark Ebell]

As shown below, I have the old version of metan installed. I have tried both ado update, update and ssc install metan to try and update it with no luck. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks, Mark

. which metan
/Users/markebell/Library/Application Support/Stata/ado/plus/m/metan.ado
*! 3.03 19May2009

. ssc uninstall metan
package not found
r(111);

. ssc install metan
checking metan consistency and verifying not already installed...

the following files already exist and are different:
/Users/markebell/Library/Application Support/Stata/ado/plus/m/metan.ado
/Users/markebell/Library/Application Support/Stata/ado/plus/f/forestplot.ado
/Users/markebell/Library/Application Support/Stata/ado/plus/f/forestplot.sthlp

no files installed or copied
(no action taken)
r(602);

[Skye Newton]

Nevermind, I managed to get it to work by using either

“metan loghr logll logul, eform effect("HR") re study(study)” OR
“admetan loghr logll logul, hr re study(study)“

Many thanks anyway!
Kind regards,
Skye

Hi David,

I'm still a bit clueless here, so apologies if I'm getting errors due to my ignorance!

I'm using Stata 15.1, and the answer to 'which metan' and 'which forestplo't are both version 4.03 28apr2021.

I'm trying to do a meta-analysis of hazard ratios from 3 studies using summary measures, so have been using the command:
metan hr ll ul, effect(Hazard Ratio) null(1) xlabel(0 .5 1 1.5) /// lcols(study) texts(200)
This produces the overall HR, but is saying 'Error in forestplot' r(198)

Any suggestions on what I should try to get it produce a forestplot?
Many thanks,
Skye

[Skye Newton]

Hi David,

I'm still a bit clueless here, so apologies if I'm getting errors due to my ignorance!

I'm using Stata 15.1, and the answer to 'which metan' and 'which forestplo't are both version 4.03 28apr2021.

I'm trying to do a meta-analysis of hazard ratios from 3 studies using summary measures, so have been using the command:
metan hr ll ul, effect(Hazard Ratio) null(1) xlabel(0 .5 1 1.5) /// lcols(study) texts(200)
This produces the overall HR, but is saying 'Error in forestplot' r(198)

Any suggestions on what I should try to get it produce a forestplot?
Many thanks,
Skye

[Suhail Doi]

Hi David,

Seems like another bug report:

For this data:

* Example generated by -dataex-. To install: ssc install dataex
clear
input str3 studyname long n int cases byte qi
"S1"  217154 422 1
"S13"    676   1 1
"S18"     44   1 1
"S26"     29   1 1
end

and this code:

metan cases n  , pr model(ivhet \ qe,qwt(qi) \ re \ iv ) transform(ftukey, iv) study( study )  denom(1000)  nograph nohet

the metan results are:

Overall,	IVhet	0.831	0.000	7.773
Overall,	QE	0.831	0.000	7.773
Overall,	DL	2.931	0.034	8.898
Overall,	IV	1.949	1.768	2.138

The results should be (changes in bold font):

Overall,	IVhet	1.951	0.000	7.773
Overall,	QE	1.951	0.000	7.773
Overall,	DL	2.931	0.000	8.898
Overall,	IV	1.949	1.768	2.138

Regards
Suhail

[Suhail Doi]

Hi David, that works great, thanks - seems I missed this in the help file!

Regards
Suhail

[David Fisher]

Hi Suhail,
I think the metan option extraline(yes) should do what you need.
Thanks,
David.

[Suhail Doi]

Hi David,

Another small suggestion for a future update - for the forestplot, if the het stats are by default on the next line after overall then it makes formatting easier. Currently they are on the same line and need adding a column before the CI plot to move them to the next line

Regards
Suhail

[Suhail Doi]

Hi David,

Many thanks for the update. Something has changed with the "range" option in forestplot (only for proportions). For example if I run the below, it used to work perfectly in the previous version but now I cannot use range to get a well fitted plot no matter what I try and even if I remove the denom option

input str3 studyname long n int cases byte qi
"S1"  217154 422 1
"S10"  16557  32 1
"S13"    676   1 1
"S18"     44   1 1
"S26"     29   1 1
end


metan cases n  , pr qe(qi) transform(ftukey, iv) study( studyname ) counts forestplot(astext(85) boxscale(35) spacing(0.99) leftjustify range(0.1 20) dp(3)) denom(1000)

Please advise
Regards
Suhail

[David Fisher]

Luis Furuya-Kanamori : Unfortunately, upon opening this thread to post the above, I realise that I completely missed your post #16. Really sorry about that; this will be top of the list for the next update! In the meantime, here is a work-around which I hope is acceptable:

preserve
    metan mild n, pr model(re \ 0.50 0.40 0.60) transform(ftukey, iv) counts clear nograph
    foreach x in ES LCI UCI {
        replace _Prop_`x' = _`x' if _LABELS=="Overall, User"
    }
    forestplot, useopts
restore

Transformed proportion data is currently handled as a unique case in metan, because the Freeman-Tukey transform and back-transform are complex. The exponential/log transform is simple, so I only need to store the log-transformed values and exponentiate them as and when needed. But with transformed proportion data I need to maintain two different sets of effect sizes. The bug you have found is a result of metan looking in the wrong place for the user-defined values. The code above copies these values and pastes them in the correct place.

Apologies again, and best wishes,

David.

[David Fisher]

Dear all,

With thanks as ever to Kit Baum, an updated version of metan (v4.03 28apr2021) is now available via SSC.

The following bugs have (hopefully) been fixed:

• cumulative option with proportions (post #12 in this thread)
• ipdmetan with aggregated data (post #13 in this thread)
• incorrect Mantel-Haenszel Risk Ratios in the presence of zero cells (post #52 in https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...lot-from-metan)
• use of lalign as a plot option in Stata 15.0 (https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...gn-not-allowed)

Thanks to all users who have reported issues; please continue to do so!

Best wishes,

David.


P.S. Please note that, as a result of this update, users of ipdmetan will also need to update that package (via SSC). The latest version of ipdmetan is now v4.02 20apr2021.

[Suhail Doi]

Luis Furuya-Kanamori and David Fisher I don't think we should open up user defined tau2 for other models especially QE or IVhet as they only work with DL values and thus would open this up to wrong implementation and then another series of problems....

Regards
Suhail

[Luis Furuya-Kanamori]

Hi David Fisher,
I think I found a bug - when I do a proportion meta-analysis using the options 'model' and 'user_spec', in the forest plot, the diamond does not appear and ‘(Insufficient data)’ appears instead of the pooled estimate.
These options seem to work fine with standard (non-proportion) meta-analysis.

Attached is the dataset and the command I used

metan mild n, pr model(re \ 0.50 0.40 0.60) transform(ftukey, iv) counts

Also, would it be possible to active the option 'sa [, isq(real) tausq(real)]' for non-standard models or modifications to standard models (at the moment it only works with standard inverse-variance random-effects model).

Regards,
Luis

[David Fisher]

Nicoletta Riva Thanks for the feedback, great to hear!

Carole Khairallah :
Thanks for the bug report. I think I have identified and fixed it (privately), but of course I am only working with my own data and not with yours. Also, I am still unsure what is going on when you say "I could get estimates from that particular study before". Therefore, could you please do one of the following things for me?
(1) Send me (via Private Message) a copy of your working data and code which reproduces the error. Anonymised and/or sampled if necessary, just so long as the error is present.
or (2) Send me a Private Message with a contact email address for you, so that I can send you a corrected version of the program which you could run on your data and feed-back on whether it works or not.

Many thanks, and best wishes,

David.