392,317 papers found

BACKGROUND: Component network meta-analysis (CNMA) enables disentangling individual component effects from multicomponent treatments. However, no established methods exist to quantify the contribution of evidence from constituent comparisons to the disentangled component effect estimates in CNMA, hindering the interpre…

Network meta-analysis (NMA) is an extension of pairwise meta-analysis that facilitates the estimation of relative effects for multiple competing treatments. A hierarchy of treatments is a useful output of an NMA. Treatment hierarchies are produced using ranking metrics. Common ranking metrics include the Surface Under…

BACKGROUND: Atypical Haemolytic Uremic Syndrome (aHUS) is a rare but life-threatening thrombotic microangiopathy. If inadequately managed, aHUS can lead to progressive kidney failure, cardiovascular complications and multiorgan dysfunction, resulting in high healthcare costs and a substantial impact on patients' qualit…

The accessibility of individual participant-level data (IPD) enhances the evaluation of moderation effects of patient covariates. It facilitates the provision of accurate estimation of intervention effects and confidence intervals by incorporating covariate correlations across multiple clinical trials. With a time-to-e…

INTRODUCTION: Life satisfaction is a key indicator of successful ageing and reflects well-being. There is evidence of the association between life satisfaction and health behaviours among older adults. Therefore, this systematic review and meta-analysis protocol seeks to determine the strength and direction of the asso…

The development of methods for the meta-analysis of diagnostic test accuracy (DTA) studies is still an active area of research. While methods for the standard case where each study reports a single pair of sensitivity and specificity are nearly routinely applied nowadays, methods to meta-analyze receiver operating char…

OBJECTIVES: Assessment of the certainty of evidence (CoE) from network meta-analysis is critical to convey the strength of inferences for clinical decision-making. Both the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation) Working Group (GWG) and the Confidence in Network Meta-Analysis (CINeMA)…

BACKGROUND: Distal gastrectomy (DG) is a commonly used surgical procedure for gastric cancer (GC), with three reconstruction methods available: Billroth I, Billroth II, and Roux-en-Y. In 2018, our team published a systematic review to provide guidance for clinical practice on the optimal reconstruction method after DG…

Network meta-analysis has been an essential methodology of systematic reviews for comparative effectiveness research. The restricted maximum likelihood (REML) method is one of the current standard inference methods for multivariate, contrast-based meta-analysis models, but recent studies have revealed the resultant con…

In meta-analysis of diagnostic test accuracy, the summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC) curve is a recommended method to summarize the diagnostic capacity of a medical test in the presence of study-specific cutoff values. The SROC curve can be estimated by bivariate modeling of pairs of sensitivity and speci…

We consider the setting of an aggregate data meta-analysis of a continuous outcome of interest. When the distribution of the outcome is skewed, it is often the case that some primary studies report the sample mean and standard deviation of the outcome and other studies report the sample median along with the first and…

INTRODUCTION: Cardiac rehabilitation has proven beneficial in cardiovascular patients and is strongly recommended for secondary prevention after a coronary event. However, overall utilisation of cardiac rehabilitation is often low. The addition of novel methods of rehabilitation may increase overall compliance with car…

Over the last decade, there has been a 10-fold increase in the number of published systematic reviews of prevalence. In meta-analyses of prevalence, the summary estimate represents an average prevalence from included studies. This estimate is truly informative only if there is no substantial heterogeneity among the dif…

BACKGROUND: Network meta-analysis (NMA) has been increasingly adopted worldwide by Cochrane reviews, guideline developers and decision-making bodies to identify optimal treatment choices. However, NMA results are often produced statically, not allowing stakeholders to 'dig deeper' and interrogate with their own judgeme…

BACKGROUND: People with depression often present with concurrent cognitive impairment. Computerized cognitive training (CCT) is a safe and efficacious strategy to maintain or enhance cognitive performance in a range of clinical populations. However, its efficacy in people with depression and how it varies across popula…

In the past years, network meta-analysis (NMA) has been widely used among clinicians, guideline makers, and health technology assessment agencies and has played an important role in clinical decision-making and guideline development. To inform further development of NMAs, we conducted a bibliometric analysis to assess…

BACKGROUND: Radiotherapy is the cornerstone in cancer treatment, and its adverse effects have been recognized widely nowadays. In response, effective and nontoxic therapies are in demand for patients affected by radiotherapy-induced adverse effects (RIAE). As a multitude of clinical studies have suggested that acupunct…

Reaching a global view of brain organization requires assembling evidence on widely different mental processes and mechanisms. The variety of human neuroscience concepts and terminology poses a fundamental challenge to relating brain imaging results across the scientific literature. Existing meta-analysis methods perfo…

The performance of statistical methods is often evaluated by means of simulation studies. In case of network meta-analysis of binary data, however, simulations are not currently available for many practically relevant settings. We perform a simulation study for sparse networks of trials under between-trial heterogeneit…

To inform evidence-based practice in health care, guidelines and policies require accurate identification, collation, and integration of all available evidence in a comprehensive, meaningful, and time-efficient manner. Approaches to evidence synthesis such as carefully conducted systematic reviews and meta-analyses are…