382,895 papers found

We read with great interest the systematic review and meta-analysis by Cigrovski Berkovicpublished recentlywhich evaluated the association between type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (pNETs). The study identified T2DM as a risk factor for the development of pNETs and linked it to poor t…

BACKGROUND: Reference intervals, which define an interval in which a specific proportion of measurements from a healthy population are expected to fall, are commonly used in medical practice. Synthesizing information from multiple studies through meta-analysis can provide a more precise and representative reference int…

Network meta-analysis (NMA), an increasingly appealing method of statistical analysis, is superior to traditional analysis methods in terms of being able to compare multiple medical treatment methods in one analysis run. In recent years, the prevalence of NMA in the medical literature has increased significantly, while…

Meta-analysis is a powerful tool to synthesize findings from multiple studies. The normal-normal random-effects model is widely used to account for between-study heterogeneity. However, meta-analyses of sparse data, which may arise when the event rate is low for binary or count outcomes, pose a challenge to the normal-…

Meta-analysis is an essential tool to comprehensively synthesize and quantitatively evaluate results of multiple clinical studies in evidence-based medicine. In many meta-analyses, the characteristics of some studies might markedly differ from those of the others, and these outlying studies can generate biases and pote…

INTRODUCTION: Acute heart failure (AHF) is a critical, costly condition with high mortality rates, affecting millions annually. Despite advances in cardiovascular care, AHF treatment lacks robust evidence. AHF commonly manifests with sudden heart failure symptoms such as pulmonary congestion, and the pathophysiology in…

INTRODUCTION: Perforated peptic ulcers are a life-threatening complication associated with high morbidity and mortality. Several treatment approaches are available. The aim of this network meta-analysis (NMA) is to compare surgical and alternative approaches for the treatment of perforated peptic ulcers regarding morta…

INTRODUCTION: Neck pain is a common problem that severely affects physical and mental health. While musculoskeletal manipulations are recommended as the first-line treatment for adults with neck pain, the comparative effectiveness of different musculoskeletal manipulations remains unclear. This systematic review and ne…

During drug development, evidence can emerge to suggest a treatment is more effective in a specific patient subgroup. Whilst early trials may be conducted in biomarker-mixed populations, later trials are more likely to enroll biomarker-positive patients alone, thus leading to trials of the same treatment investigated i…

INTRODUCTION: Breast cancer is the tumor with highest incidence in women worldwide and adjuvant treatment is extremely important to achieve disease control. Given the relevance of systematic reviews, their rigor should be warranted to avoid biased conclusions. Our objective was to investigate the methodological quality…

Individual participant data (IPD) from multiple sources allows external validation of a prognostic model across multiple populations. Often this reveals poor calibration, potentially causing poor predictive performance in some populations. However, rather than discarding the model outright, it may be possible to modify…

Network meta-analysis is a commonly used tool to combine direct and indirect evidence in systematic reviews of multiple treatments to improve estimation compared to traditional pairwise meta-analysis. Unlike the contrast-based network meta-analysis approach, which focuses on estimating relative effects such as odds rat…

OBJECTIVE: The objective of the study is to examine the analytic approach of meta-analyses that include noninferiority or equivalence (NI/EQ) trials. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: We used Scopus to identify meta-analyses including NI/EQ trials. We extracted data from the meta-analyses and their included randomized clinica…

INTRODUCTION: The optimal dose-fractionation schedule of palliative radiotherapy has been debated in patients with bone metastases. Our objective is to comprehensively compare multiple fraction schedules with single fraction radiotherapy in terms of efficacy and toxicities by performing a systematic review and network…

INTRODUCTION: Inguinal hernia mesh repair is the standard care for symptomatic inguinal hernia. Mesh fixation is used to keep mesh in place for which various mesh fixation techniques have been used in open and laparoscopic inguinal hernia repair, but their effectiveness has remained inconclusive. Therefore, we develope…

Meta-analyses of clinical trials targeting rare events face particular challenges when the data lack adequate numbers of events for all treatment arms. Especially when the number of studies is low, standard random-effects meta-analysis methods can lead to serious distortions because of such data sparsity. To overcome t…

Missing data result in less precise and possibly biased effect estimates in single studies. Bias arising from studies with incomplete outcome data is naturally propagated in a meta-analysis. Conventional analysis using only individuals with available data is adequate when the meta-analyst can be confident that the data…

Network meta-analysis (NMA) uses both direct and indirect evidence to compare the efficacy and harm between several treatments. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is a statistical method that investigates relations among observed and latent variables. Previous studies have shown that the contrast-based Lu-Ades model fo…

OBJECTIVES: We aimed to develop and evaluate an algorithm for automatically screening citations when updating living network meta-analysis (NMA). STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: Our algorithm learns from the initial screening of citations conducted when creating an NMA to automatically identify eligible citations (i.e., nee…

The use of data from multiple studies or centers for the validation of a clinical test or a multivariable prediction model allows researchers to investigate the test's/model's performance in multiple settings and populations. Recently, meta-analytic techniques have been proposed to summarize discrimination and calibrat…