392,509 papers found

Meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials combines information from independent studies that address a similar question to provide more reliable estimates of treatment effects. At the present time, the methodology and usefulness of meta-analysis is under scrutiny. In the first part of this paper, we summarize the l…

The usual meta-analysis of a sequence of randomized clinical trials only considers the difference between two treatments and produces a point estimate and a confidence interval for a parameter that measures this difference. The usual parameter is the log(odds ratio) linked to Mantel-Haenszel methodology. Inference is m…

Meta-analysis is a method of synthesizing evidence from multiple sources. It has been increasingly applied to combine results from randomized trials of therapeutic strategies. Unfortunately there is often variation in the quality of the trials that are included in meta-analyses, limiting the value of combining the resu…

While otitis media is perhaps the most common disease of childhood that receives medical attention, there is little agreement concerning the efficacy of the medical and surgical therapies employed to try to alleviate its symptoms or hasten its natural resolution. Because various surgeries including adenoidectomy, myrin…

A pooled estimate of the magnitude of the benefit and side effects of injectable gold salts in rheumatoid arthritis was computed using meta-analysis based upon available evidence in the literature. Active joint count, grip strength, functional capacity, hemoglobin concentration and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR)…

Meta-analysis with continuous outcomes presents a range of methodological challenges. Among these, two issues have received increasing attention: (i) integrating studies that report only the five-number summary (such as the median, interquartile range, and range) rather than the sample mean and standard deviation (SD),…

INTRODUCTION: Delayed post-polypectomy bleeding (DPPB) remains a significant complication of endoscopic resection, contributing to morbidity and increased healthcare costs. Although prophylactic clipping is widely practised to mitigate this risk, evidence from recent randomised controlled trials (RCTs) regarding its ef…

Balance impairment is a major motor symptom of Parkinson's disease (PD), leading to falls, reduced mobility, and lower quality of life. Despite advances in pharmacological and rehabilitation approaches, postural instability often persists, requiring effective adjunctive interventions. Vibration therapy (VT) is a non-in…

To understand a treatment's potential impact at the individual level, it is crucial to explore whether the effect differs across patient subgroups and covariate values. Meta-analysis provides an important tool for detecting treatment-covariate interactions, as it can improve power compared to a single study. However, a…

INTRODUCTION: Antenatal depression (AD), a maternal mental health condition, has been increasingly prevalent in recent years. It is often triggered by various stressors, including hormonal changes, relationship problems and economic challenges. In Ghana, there is currently no recent nationally representative prevalence…

BACKGROUND: Meta-analysis is a useful method for combining evidence from multiple studies to detect treatment effects that could perhaps not be identified in a single study. While traditionally meta-analysis has assumed that populations of included studies are comparable, over recent years the development of precision…

The meta-analysis reported in Vahey et al. (2015) concluded that the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) has high clinical criterion validity (meta-analytic r‾ = .45) and therefore "the potential of the IRAP as a tool for clinical assessment" (p. 64). Vahey et al. (2015) also reported power…

INTRODUCTION: Women with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) are more likely to give birth to large for gestational age (LGA) infants, due to abnormalities in glucose metabolism during pregnancy. Although previous studies have explored the risk factors for LGA delivery in GDM women, the results are quite different and…

The development of new statistical models for the meta-analysis of diagnostic test accuracy studies is still an ongoing field of research, especially with respect to summary receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. In the recently published updated version of the "Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Diag…

OBJECTIVES: People living with dementia often experience behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD), which severely affect their well-being during the course of the disease. Particularly for BPSD outcomes, there is a high demand for increasing the evidence-based knowledge of non-pharmacological approache…

BACKGROUND: Traditionally, meta-analysis of time-to-event outcomes reports a single pooled hazard ratio assuming proportional hazards (PH). For health technology assessment evaluations, hazard ratios are frequently extrapolated across a lifetime horizon. However, when treatment effects vary over time, an assumption of…

BACKGROUND: Binary outcomes are likely the most common in randomized controlled trials, but ordinal outcomes can also be of interest. For example, rather than simply collecting data on diseased versus healthy study subjects, investigators may collect information on the severity of disease, with no disease, mild, modera…

INTRODUCTION: Brain dysfunction in sepsis is known as sepsis-associated encephalopathy (SAE), which often results in severe cognitive and neurological sequelae and increases the risk of death. Neuron specific enolase (NSE) may serve as an important neurocritical biomarker for detection and longitudinal monitoring in SA…

INTRODUCTION: The review aims to conduct the first network meta-analysis to comprehensively evaluate the application of multiple acupuncture techniques in patients with postmenopausal osteoporosis, ranking the best acupuncture treatment and providing a reference for clinical treatment extensively. METHODS AND ANALYSIS…