392,419 papers found

AIM: To review and examine the effectiveness of non-pharmacological interventions on behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia using information and communication technology. DESIGN: This is a systematic review and meta-analysis. METHODS: The databases including PubMed, CINAHL with Full Text (EBSCOhost), Psy…

Recently, Gao et al. published an article titled "Monthly versus quarterly fremanezumab for the prevention of migraine: a systemic review and meta-analysis from randomized controlled trials" which concluded that monthly administration of fremanezumab led to significant reduction in monthly migraine days (MMD) when comp…

Systematic reviews underpin clinical practice and policies that guide healthcare decisions. A core component of many systematic reviews is meta-analysis, which is a statistical synthesis of results across studies. Errors in the conduct and interpretation of meta-analysis can lead to incorrect conclusions regarding the…

INTRODUCTION: Opioid use disorder (OUD) is a worldwide health problem. Clinical trials indicated that acupuncture combined with medication is effective in OUD, however, there are different conclusions presented by previous trials. This study is designed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of acupuncture combined with m…

Meta-analyses based on systematic literature reviews are commonly used to obtain a quantitative summary of the available evidence on a given topic. However, the reliability of any meta-analysis is constrained by that of its constituent studies. One major limitation is the possibility of small-study effects, when estima…

INTRODUCTION: Research focusing on the associations between non-medical determinants and unfavourable perinatal health outcomes is increasing. Despite increasing knowledge on this theme, it still remains unclear to what extent social, environmental and lifestyle factors contribute to these unfavourable outcomes. Theref…

INTRODUCTION: Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) is a universal chronic inflammatory rheumatic disease which predominantly results in chronic back pain and stiffness. However, some patients suffering from AS do not react well to pharmacological interventions. Exercise intervention has been employed for the treatment of AS and…

BACKGROUND: Upon surviving the first year post-lung transplantation, recipients can expect a median survival of 8 years. Within the first year, graft failure and multi-organ failure (possibly secondary to graft failure) are common causes of mortality. To better understand the prognosis within the first year, we…

It is widely recommended that any developed-diagnostic or prognostic-prediction model is externally validated in terms of its predictive performance measured by calibration and discrimination. When multiple validations have been performed, a systematic review followed by a formal meta-analysis helps to summarize overal…

BACKGROUND: Individual patient data (IPD) meta-analysis allows for the exploration of heterogeneity and can identify subgroups that most benefit from an intervention (or exposure), much more successfully than meta-analysis of aggregate data. One-stage or two-stage IPD meta-analysis is possible, with the former using mi…

INTRODUCTION: The sequelae of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) are poorly understood and inconsistently reported. We will aim to assess the existing evidence for the clinical, psychological, social and economic sequelae of MDR-TB and to assess the health-related quality of life in patients with MDR-TB. METHOD…

Low power in neuroimaging studies can make them difficult to interpret, and Coordinate based meta-analysis (CBMA) may go some way to mitigating this issue. CBMA has been used in many analyses to detect where published functional MRI or voxel-based morphometry studies testing similar hypotheses report significant summar…

INTRODUCTION: Evidence from observational studies and randomised controlled trials suggests that breastfeeding is positively associated with IQ, possibly because breast milk is a source of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids. Different studies have detected gene-breastfeeding interactions involving FADS2 variants an…

Summarizing the information of many studies using a meta-analysis becomes more and more important, also in the field of diagnostic studies. The special challenge in meta-analysis of diagnostic accuracy studies is that in general sensitivity and specificity are co-primary endpoints. Across the studies both endpoints are…

A common assumption in meta-analysis is that effect sizes are independent. When correlated effect sizes are analyzed using traditional univariate techniques, this assumption is violated. This research assesses the impact of dependence arising from treatment-control studies with multiple endpoints on homogeneity measure…

Nesting of patients within care providers in trials of physical and talking therapies creates an additional level within the design. The statistical implications of this are analogous to those of cluster randomised trials, except that the clustering effect may interact with treatment and can be restricted to one or mor…

Clinical trials are typically designed with an aim to reach sufficient power to test a hypothesis about relative effectiveness of two or more interventions. Their role in informing evidence-based decision-making demands, however, that they are considered in the context of the existing evidence. Consequently, their plan…

Despite the great realized or potential value of network meta-analysis of randomized controlled trial evidence to inform health care decision making, many decision makers might not be familiar with these techniques. The Task Force developed a consensus-based 26-item questionnaire to help decision makers assess the rele…

Multiple imputation is a strategy for the analysis of incomplete data such that the impact of the missingness on the power and bias of estimates is mitigated. When data from multiple studies are collated, we can propose both within-study and multilevel imputation models to impute missing data on covariates. It is not c…

The use of individual participant data (IPD) from multiple studies is an increasingly popular approach when developing a multivariable risk prediction model. Corresponding datasets, however, typically differ in important aspects, such as baseline risk. This has driven the adoption of meta-analytical approaches for appr…