392,419 papers found

Systematic reviews, with or without meta-analysis, play an important role today in synthesizing cancer research and are frequently used to guide decision-making. However, there is now an increase in the number of systematic reviews on the same topic, thereby necessitating a systematic review of previous systematic revi…

BACKGROUND: Sarcopenia is a clinical syndrome characterized by a significant reduction in muscle mass and strength, typically associated with the ageing process. In recent years, an increasing number of studies have shown that sarcopenia not only affects functional health in the elderly but may also be closely associat…

BACKGROUND: Early identification of patients at risk for postoperative delirium is essential because adequate well-timed interventions could reduce the occurrence of delirium and the related detrimental outcomes. METHODS: We will conduct a systematic review and individual patient data (IPD) meta-analysis of prognostic…

The reproducibility crisis highlights several unresolved issues in science, including the need to develop measures that gauge both the consistency and convergence of data sets. While existing meta-analytic methods quantify the consistency of evidence, they do not quantify its convergence: the extent to which different…

The partial correlation coefficient (PCC) is used to quantify the linear relationship between two variables while taking into account/controlling for other variables. Researchers frequently synthesize PCCs in a meta-analysis, but two of the assumptions of the common equal-effect and random-effects meta-analysis model a…

In the era of the "reproducibility crisis" and the "P-value controversy" new ways of presentation and interpretation of the results of a meta-analysis are desirable. One suggestion that has been made for single studies almost six decades ago and taken up now and then is the P-value function. For a given outcome, this f…

Extrapolation from a source to a target, eg, from adults to children, is a promising approach to utilize external information when data are sparse. In the context of meta-analyses, one is commonly faced with a small number of studies, whereas potentially relevant additional information may also be available. Here, we d…

The Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality is the dominant hierarchical model of personality. Previous work has demonstrated the importance of the FFM domains and facets in understanding a variety of antisocial behaviors ranging from non-violent antisocial behavior to a variety of aggression outcomes. The aim of the pr…

AIM: The importance of adjusting for cross-study heterogeneity when conducting network meta-analyses (NMAs) was demonstrated using a case study of biologic therapies for moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis. METHODS: Bayesian NMAs were conducted for Psoriasis Area and Severity Index 90 response. Several covariates were…

Previous procedures for meta-analyzing dependent correlations have been found to overestimate or underestimate the true variation in effect sizes. Samplewise-adjusted procedures have been shown to perform better than simple within-study means when meta-analyzing dependent correlations. However, such procedures cannot b…

A modification of the first stage of the standard procedure for two-stage meta-analytic structural equation modeling for use with large complex datasets is presented. This modification addresses two common problems that arise in such meta-analyses: (a) primary studies that provide multiple measures of the same construc…

When considering data from many trials, it is likely that some of them present a markedly different intervention effect or exert an undue influence on the summary results. We develop a forward search algorithm for identifying outlying and influential studies in meta-analysis models. The forward search algorithm starts…

Systematic reviews (SR) are studies made in order to ask clinical questions based on original articles. Meta-analysis (MTA) is the mathematical analysis of SR. These analyses are divided in two groups, those which evaluate the measured results of quantitative variables (for example, the body mass index -BMI-) and those…

Observational studies represent a wide group of studies where the disease or condition of interest is naturally occurring and the investigator does not control allocation to interventions or exposures. Observational studies are used to test hypotheses about the efficacy of interventions or about exposure-disease relati…

BACKGROUND: Currently, there are a number of clinical trials, but no international collaboration for collating research on effectiveness of laparoscopic uterosacral nerve ablation (LUNA) for alleviating chronic pelvic pain. OBJECTIVE: Meta-analysis was used by collecting individual patient data (IPD) from the existing…