386,595 papers found

Attempts to estimate the effects of dietary cholesterol on serum cholesterol by meta-analysis have not previously included baseline together with added dietary cholesterol in a mathematical model. Mean reported changes in serum cholesterol from 27 studies in which controlled diets were supplied by a metabolic kitchen p…

OBJECTIVE: Clinical experience and patient-level physiological studies indicate that albuterol transiently reduces oxygen saturation, irrespective of the underlying respiratory condition causing the wheezing. Three revisions of the Cochrane review, Bronchodilators for Bronchiolitis (Review), have found that albuterol t…

A meta-analysis of 51 studies was done to estimate normative mean McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) scores and to assess pain quality and pain intensity as measured by the MPQ in 3,624 subjects with seven painful conditions. Across the painful conditions, all of the estimated normative mean scores were no more than 50% o…

As beta-adrenoreceptor blockers have been shown to reduce mortality following myocardial infarction by around 20%, a similar pattern of 'cardioprotection' was looked for in hypertensive patients. Several non-randomised retrospective studies have suggested that beta-blockers may reduce either the mortality or morbidity…

Whether ceftazidime monotherapy is equal in efficacy to combination regimens (Comb) for empiric treatment of febrile neutropenic patients was tested using meta-analysis. Published studies and abstracts of ceftazidime trials were identified, their quality assessed, the efficacy data abstracted and pooled, and effects of…

Studies designed to examine effects of weight reduction by dieting on total cholesterol (TC), low-density-lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), high-density-lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), very-low-density-lipoprotein cholesterol (VLDL-C), and triglycerides (TGs) have reported inconsistent results. The purpose of this stud…

Publication bias can result from the propensity of researchers to document what is unusual. This can distort the inferences drawn in systematic reviews. To measure the distortion, it has been suggested that a second analysis be done; using weights proportional to the size of the population from which the samples are dr…

The efficacy of fish oil in decreasing restenosis following percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) remains controversial despite seven published reports of randomized trials involving 951 patients. We performed a meta-analysis to determine whether these trials, viewed in aggregate, demonstrate a signific…

Although several dozen studies on individualized instruction in dental education have been conducted over the past 30 years, little has been done to summarize quantitatively these studies. The present investigation used Glass' techniques of meta-analysis to integrate statistically findings from 34 comparative studies o…

Two recent meta-analyses have generated evidence for child and adolescent psychotherapy effects. However, critics note that such meta-analyses often include studies with methodological shortcomings which might invalidate their results. In the present study, we explored whether the results of the most extensive child/ad…

The role of thermography for diagnosing lumbar radiculopathy was evaluated by literature review and meta-analysis. From 81 relevant citations, 28 studies could be analyzed for diagnostic-accuracy data (sensitivity and specificity) and method. Diagnostic-accuracy data varied significantly between studies; therefore mean…

A meta-analysis was performed to examine the relation of patients' sociodemographic characteristics to their satisfaction with medical care. The sociodemographic characteristics were age, ethnicity, sex, socioeconomic status (three indices), marital status, and family size. Greater satisfaction was significantly associ…

The physics, physiology, and pathology of electrical conductivity of milk are described. Based on a meta analysis, the use of electrical conductivity as a mastitis detection tool is discussed. Most reports were based on subclinical mastitis data. The gold standards of the different reports are discussed. With an overal…

In this meta-analysis of 34 clinical studies on attachment the hypothesis is tested that maternal problems such as mental illness lead to more deviating attachment classification distributions than child problems such as deafness. A correspondence analysis on 21 North American studies with normal subjects produced a ba…

OBJECTIVES: To empirically evaluate the performance of methods for estimating odds ratios and their corresponding standard errors from continuous end point data for meta-analysis. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: A database of randomized controlled trials of chronic depression treatments was used. Trials that reported both c…

BACKGROUND: For minimally-invasive surgery (MIS), there are numerous acceptable port-site closure techniques with no consensus on the method used. AIM: To identify optimal port site postoperative wound closure method following MIS with respect to complication rates and cosmetic outcome. METHODS: Network meta-analysis…

The results are described of a meta-analysis of seven randomized trials that compared the clinical effects of the standard solution of WHO oral rehydration salts (ORS), containing 20 milligrams of glucose, and experimental ORS solutions, containing glycine, on 643 children with acute noncholera diarrhoea. The availabil…