5,084,806 papers found

Systematic reviews of values and preferences are essential to ensure that healthcare decision-making and clinical practice guidelines reflect what truly matters to patients, caregivers, policymakers, and other interest-holders. These reviews synthesize evidence on how people value different health outcomes and provide…

There are numerous tools available to assess the risk of bias in individual studies in a systematic review. These tools have different structures, including scales and checklists, which may or may not separate their items by domains. There are also various approaches and guides for the process, scoring, and interpretat…

Several editions of the World Health Organization (WHO) classifications of lympho-hemopoietic neoplasms in 2001, 2008 and 2017 served as the international standard for diagnosis. Since the 4th WHO edition, here referred as WHO-HAEM4, significant clinico-pathological, immunophenotypic and molecular advances have been ma…

Paraesophageal hernias represent 5%-10% of all primary hiatal hernias and are becoming increasingly more common with the aging of the population. Surgical treatment includes closure of the wide hiatal gap. Achieving tension-free closure is difficult, and several studies have reported lower recurrence rates with the use…

Systematic reviews are the most common form of knowledge synthesis and remain a cornerstone of the practice of evidence-based medicine. They offer enhanced rigor and validity relative to traditional narrative review articles by reducing bias and increasing objectivity. In answering focused research questions, systemati…

From 2010 to 2012, nine systematic reviews reported highly variable conclusions regarding the association between carriage of a cytochrome P450 2C19 loss-of-function allele and the risk of adverse cardiovascular (CV) events in individuals using clopidogrel. Possible contributors to the variable findings include differe…

Clinical trials test hypotheses that are accepted or rejected according to a predetermined probability of error (level of significance). Significance does not however mean relevance. Good parameters of relevance are absolute risk reduction and based on this the calculation of the number of patients who need to be treat…

The current diagnostic criteria for gestational diabetes mellitus are controversial because they lack correlation to maternal and perinatal outcome. The results of the hyperglycemia and adverse pregnancy outcome (HAPO) study demonstrate a linear association between increasing levels of fasting, 1- and 2-h plasma glucos…

OBJECTIVE: To assist investigators planning, coordinating, and conducting systematic reviews in the selection of data-extraction tools for conducting systematic reviews. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: We constructed an initial table listing available data-collection tools and reflecting our experience with these tools and…

Widespread reliance on animal models during preclinical research and toxicity testing assumes their reasonable predictivity for human outcomes. However, of 20 published systematic reviews examining human clinical utility, located during a comprehensive literature search, animal models demonstrated significant potential…

The new imperative in the health disciplines to be more methodologically inclusive has generated a growing interest in mixed research synthesis, or the integration of qualitative and quantitative research findings. Qualitative metasummary is a quantitatively oriented aggregation of qualitative findings originally devel…

INTRODUCTION: Multiple sclerosis is the most important disabling neurological disease in young adulthood in our environment. However, its etiology remains unknown. It has been proposed that multiple sclerosis is caused by an interaction of genetic and environmental factors. In particular, Epstein-Barr virus infection c…

Several taxonomies exist for rating individual studies and the strength of recommendations, making the analysis of evidence confusing for practitioners. A new grading scale-the Strength of Recommendation Taxonomy (SORT)-will be used by several family medicine and primary care journals (required or optional), allowing r…

This paper, first of a series devoted to evidence-based medicine, describes how to critically read an article on a randomised controlled intervention trial. This guide is applied to the common clinical question, whether or not to prescribe systemic glucocorticoids for patients with exacerbation of chronic obstructive p…

High quality research evidence for nursing practice is available from the Cochrane Library and in clinical practice guidelines produced by professional associations. The transfer of research evidence into practice is a complex process, and changing provider behavior is a challenge, even when the relative advantages are…

PURPOSE: This article summarizes the current research available concerning the removal of impacted third molars, and provides a background from which practitioners, public health policy advocates, and third-party payers can more objectively assess the the issues of appropriateness of care and overutilization of third m…