A method of back-calculating the log odds ratio and standard error of the log odds ratio from the reported group-level risk of disease

Abstract

In clinical trials and observational studies, the effect of an intervention or exposure can be reported as an absolute or relative comparative measure such as risk difference, odds ratio or risk ratio, or at the group level with the estimated risk of disease in each group. For meta-analysis of results with covariate adjustment, the log of the odds ratio (log odds ratio), with its standard error, is a commonly used measure of effect. However, extracting the adjusted log odds ratio from the reported estimates of disease risk in each group is not straightforward. Here, we propose a method to transform the adjusted probability of the event in each group to the log of the odds ratio and obtain the appropriate (approximate) standard error, which can then use used in a meta-analysis. We also use example data to compare our method with two other methods and show that our method is superior in calculating the standard error of the log odds ratio.