[R] Summarising Data for Forrest Plots

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

I tried to post this a few times last week and it seems to have got stuck somehow so I'm trying from a different email in the hope that works.   If somehow this has appeared on the list 20 tiems and I never saw any of them I apologize ;-)

I'm basically an R-newbie.  But I am VERY computer literate.  But this has me stumped...

All the examples for using the rmeta package to create a forest plot or simillar seem to use the catheter data:

         Name n.trt n.ctrl col.trt col.ctrl inf.trt inf.ctrl
1      Ciresi   124    127      15       21      13       14
2      George    44     35      10       25       1        3
3      Hannan    68     60      22       22       5        7
4       Heard   151    157      60       82       5        6
...

As I see it thats a summary of data from several published trials.

What I want to do is do a forrest (forest) plot for subgroups within my single dataset as a test of heterogeniety. I have a dataset who received either full dose(FD) or reduced dose(RD) treatment, and a number of characteristics about those subjects: age, sex, renal function, weight, toxicity.  And I have survival data (censored).  they are in standard columnar data.

Is there an *easy* way to transform them into something like this:

        SubGroup        n.FD    n.RD    surv.FD         surv.RD
1       Age >65
2       Age <= 65
3       Male
...
9       Grade 0-2 Tox
10      Grade 3/4 Tox

Which rmeta will then let me use to create a forest plot from?  This is a reasonably standard approach in biomedical studies these days so it seems odd that I can't find any "How-To" that tells me how to short cut it.  Otherwise I have to manually calculate each of the parameters :-(  Which is a real pain as we are awaiting more mature data which would need the same process re-run.

Thanks in advance

C

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