392,350 papers found

Traditional pairwise meta-analysis (PMA) is a very useful method that pools evidence from one study design type if appropriate; its widespread use in nutrition research is an important phenomenon. Recently, a promising method for more advanced evidence-synthesis, called network meta-analysis (NMA), was introduced. NMA…

INTRODUCTION: Although the effectiveness of acupuncture for episodic migraine has been confirmed by multiple clinical trials and Cochrane systematic reviews, the mechanisms underlying the specific effect of acupuncture for migraine remain controversial. We aim to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of acupuncture for…

Noncompliance to assigned treatment is a common challenge in analysis and interpretation of randomized clinical trials. The complier average causal effect (CACE) approach provides a useful tool for addressing noncompliance, where CACE is defined as the average difference in potential outcomes for the response in the su…

INTRODUCTION: Constipation is one of the most common gastrointestinal symptoms in postpartum mothers. The choice of treatments for postpartum constipation remains a challenging clinical problem. Chinese herbal medicine has become increasingly popular as an alternative therapy for constipation. This systematic review ai…

INTRODUCTION: A number of observational studies have indicated that poststroke depression could increase the risk of stroke outcomes. There is a meta-analysis indicating that poststroke depression is a risk factor of all-cause mortality. This paper reports the protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis to clari…

BACKGROUND: We aimed to determine the methodological quality of network meta-analyses (NMAs) and their compliance with reporting guidelines. METHODS: A systematic review of NMAs comparing any pharmacological interventions was performed (searches in Medline and Scopus). The characteristics of NMAs were collected by two…

BACKGROUND: Childhood obesity has become a global epidemic irrespective of the socioeconomic status of a country or nation. Obesity increases the risk of various diseases in children, for example asthma, sleep apnea, bone and joint problems, type-2 diabetes, and heart problems. The existing literature informs us of the…

To evaluate the report quality of intervention-related systematic reviews or Meta-analysis published in China Journal of Chinese Materia Medica, we searched CNKI and China Journal of Chinese Materia Medica webpages to collect intervention-related systematic reviews or Meta-analysis since the first issue of the magazine…

BACKGROUND: Motivated by the setting of clinical trials in low back pain, this work investigated statistical methods to identify patient subgroups for which there is a large treatment effect (treatment by subgroup interaction). Statistical tests for interaction are often underpowered. Individual patient data (IPD) meta…

OBJECTIVES: Systematic reviews and meta-analysis are the standard methods to assess the association between prognostic markers and major events/conditions. However, the summary measures reported are not always explicitly presented and therefore different indirect methods of extracting estimates have been proposed. The…

Multiple papers have studied the use of gene-environment (G-E) independence to enhance power for testing gene-environment interaction in case-control studies. However, studies that evaluate the role of G-E independence in a meta-analysis framework are limited. In this paper, we extend the single-study empirical Bayes t…

To compare the accuracy of multiple diagnostic tests in a single study, three designs are commonly used (i) the multiple test comparison design; (ii) the randomized design, and (iii) the non-comparative design. Existing meta-analysis methods of diagnostic tests (MA-DT) have been focused on evaluating the performance of…

Meta-analyses of individual participant data (MIPDs) offer many advantages and are considered the highest level of evidence. However, MIPDs can be seriously compromised when they are not solidly founded upon a systematic review. These data-intensive collaborative projects may be led by experts who already have deep kno…

Individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis is a meta-analysis in which the individual-level data for each study are obtained and used for synthesis. A common challenge in IPD meta-analysis is when variables of interest are measured differently in different studies. The term harmonization has been coined to describ…

BACKGROUND: In meta-analyses of diagnostic test accuracy, routinely only one pair of sensitivity and specificity per study is used. However, for tests based on a biomarker or a questionnaire often more than one threshold and the corresponding values of true positives, true negatives, false positives and false negatives…

BACKGROUND: Research examining the effects of oxytocin (OT) interventions on psychiatric, social-behavioral, and social-cognitive outcomes regularly collect peripheral levels of OT as markers of central bioavailability. Such inferences rest on the assumption that central and peripheral levels of OT are directly associa…

The multivariate random effects model is a generalization of the standard univariate model. Multivariate meta-analysis is becoming more commonly used and the techniques and related computer software, although continually under development, are now in place. In order to raise awareness of the multivariate methods, and d…

INTRODUCTION: Irritable bowel syndrome with diarrhoea (IBS-D) significantly impairs patients' quality of life. Although various non-pharmacological interventions show promise, evidence on their comparative effectiveness remains limited. This protocol outlines a systematic review and network meta-analysis designed to co…

Meta-analyses constitute fundamental tools of the Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) aiming at synthesizing outcome data from individual trials in order to produce pooled effect estimates for various outcomes of interest. Combining summary data from several studies increases the sample size, improves the statistical power o…

Random-effects meta-analysis is one of the mainstream methods for research synthesis. The heterogeneity in meta-analyses is usually assumed to follow a normal distribution. This is actually a strong assumption, but one that often receives little attention and is used without justification. Although methods for assessin…