382,703 papers found

INTRODUCTION: Stroke, one of the leading causes of death worldwide, leads to disability in most patients, posing a burden on society and families. Intensive rehabilitation in the early stages is the most effective method of minimising these disabilities. Home-based rehabilitation strategies have emerged as a promising…

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…

INTRODUCTION: When patients report a penicillin allergy (self-reported penicillin allergy, SRPA), clinicians alter their antibiotic management of the patient. However, fewer than 5% of SRPA have life-threatening reactions, and receiving narrower spectrum antibiotics may result in under treatment. Reports from community…

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…

INTRODUCTION: Acute unstable syndesmosis injuries require accurate reduction and stable fixation to improve short-term and long-term outcomes. Several different fixation methods have been established for acute syndesmosis injuries, each with pros and cons. Although some meta-analyses have reported better outcomes with…

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…

N-of-1 trials are currently receiving broader attention in healthcare research when assessing the effectiveness of interventions. In contrast to the most commonly applied two-arm randomized controlled trial (RCT), in an N-of-1 design, the individual acts as their own control condition in the sense of a multiple crossov…

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…

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…

BACKGROUND: There is a growing interest in the inclusion of real-world and observational studies in evidence synthesis such as meta-analysis and network meta-analysis in public health. While this approach offers great epidemiological opportunities, use of such studies often introduce a significant issue of double-count…

OBJECTIVES: To (a) identify methodological and application papers reporting a model developed specifically for diagnostic test accuracy network meta-analysis (DTA-NMA) or a hierarchical meta-regression method for comparing at least three index tests; (b) review and summarize the characteristics of the methods and the a…

INTRODUCTION: The disease burden caused by type 2 diabetes mellitus is a prime public health concern. The prevalence and rate of deaths from diabetes mellitus in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are higher than the high-income countries. Increased physical activity and a balanced diet are essential and successf…