A matching-adjusted indirect comparison (MAIC), a type of indirect treatment comparison method, may be used to compare the efficacy of different therapies when direct head-to-head comparisons do not exist.

The quality of MAICs should be carefully evaluated according to best practices, various sources of bias should be identified, and the results of a MAIC should be interpreted in the context of potential biases present.

The quality of the conduct and reporting varied greatly in the three identified MAIC publications in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA).

Findings from a MAIC can be misleading because of cross-trial differences in inclusion/exclusion criteria, baseline characteristics, definitions and assessment schedules of outcomes, and key baseline confounders not balanced after weighting, especially in the context of SMA.