[R-meta] Questions about the use of metaprop for the pooling of proportions

[Thiago Roza]

Dear all,

I am conducting a meta-analysis about characteristics of suicide
deaths in post-mortem studies. My aim is to describe pooled
proportions of key characteristics (biological sex, suicide site,
race, marital status, suicide method, the proportion of substance use
near death, proportion of psychiatric diagnosis prior to death, etc)
across the included studies. Initially, I thought that "metaprop" from
the package "meta" would be enough to pool all these proportions
across included studies. Nevertheless, some of these variables have
more than one category (i.e. suicide method has more than 10
categories: such as hanging, firearm, poisoning, etc), and the pooling
of the proportion of each suicide method separately produces results
which when summed up give more than 100% for the summed proportion of
all suicide methods. Therefore, my first question is: is it possible
to pool all those proportions using "metaprop"? If yes, could anyone
give an example about the coding for the pooling of proportions in the
case of suicide methods? If not, is there any other package that would
allow me to pool the aggregate proportion of suicide methods?

Thank you,

Thiago Roza