Systematic reviews of randomised trials are now widely recognised to be the best way to summarise the evidence on the effects of medical interventions. A systematic review may (though it need not) contain a meta-analysis, `a statistical analysis which combines the results of several independent...

In the presence of dependent competing risks in survival analysis, the Cox proportional hazards model can be utilised to examine covariate effects on the cause-specific hazard function for each type of failure. The method proposed by Lunn and McNeil (1995) requires data augmentation. With k...