[R] forest (meta) editing text

[Polwart Calum (County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust)]

OK - I've been doing some work on getting a forest plot or two together for a sub-group analaysis.  Thats the crucial thing - because its a sub-group analysis rather than a meta-analsysis and all the forest (meta) and forestplot (rmeta) instructions assume you are doing a meta-analysis.

I found rmeta didn't play nicely for me so I'm using the meta package with forest.  Here's some code that would allow you to reproduce it:

library(meta)
mydata.forest.DoseRed = data.frame(c(1,7,14,6,16), c(7,21,10,15,23), c(1,1,5,2,5), c(4,7,6,5,12))
colnames(mydata.forest.DoseRed)=c("n.DR","n.No.DR", "E.DR","E.No.DR")
rownames(mydata.forest.DoseRed)=c( "Age: 50-59",   "Age: 60-69 ", "Age: >70", "Sex: F ", "Sex: M")

mydata.meta.DoseRed = metabin(
                E.DR, n.DR, E.No.DR, n.No.DR,
                data=mydata.forest.DoseRed,
                sm="RR", meth="MH",
                studlab=rownames(mydata.forest.DoseRed)
                )

forest(
                mydata.meta.DoseRed,
                comb.fixed=TRUE,
                comb.random=FALSE,
                leftcols="studlab",
                plotwidth=unit(8, "cm"),
                at = c(0.5,1.0,2.0,3.5),
                xlim = c(0.22, 3.48)
                )

Thats roughly what I want.  There is a jpeg of it here:  http://www.wittongilbert.free-online.co.uk/forest.jpg

BUT - there are two problems:

Firstly the subgroups have a heading called Study - which makes sense for a meta-analysis but should say something like sub-groups for a sub-group analysis.  Anyone know if this is customisable?

Secondly I want to display a global effect (i.e. the RR and confidence intervals for the whole study population) - thats what the diamond should show but it actually is the MH Fixed Effect Model.  Again - probably appropriate for a meta-analysis but I know the actual value for the whole population so i don't have to model it...  Anyone know how to get that top plot instead?  forest doesn't open a standard plot window so you can't simply use plot commands to send extra stuff to the window.

Or do I need to use plot (mydata.meta.DoseRed) and then build up the extra info from there?  Still surprised this isn't a proper function!


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