392,509 papers found

Meta-analysis is a systematic and quantified synthesis of all clinical trials studying the same question. It is systematic because it implies an exhaustive search for all trials of the studied treatment, favourable or not, published and unpublished. It is quantified because it is based on statistical calculations leadi…

Studies comparing more than two competing therapies are common in several fields, but standard meta-analytic methods can make only pairwise comparisons. The methods proposed in this article, a generalization of current meta-analytic methods, allow for any number of competing therapies and include both fixed- and random…

Psychiatric disorders are common and can be severe. There is a need to identify biomarkers of psychiatric disorders to better diagnose and treat patients with psychiatric symptoms. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) is a tool used to measure the levels of various metabolites in the human brain, and MRS studies of ps…

The evidence-based health care movement has generated new opportunity for scholars to generate synthesized sources of evidence. Systematic reviews are rigorous forms of synthesized evidence that scholars can conduct if they have requisite skills, time, and access to excellent library resources. Systematic reviews play…

Proponents of evidence-based medicine (EBM) have argued convincingly for applying this scientific method to medicine. However, the current methodological framework of the EBM movement has recently been called into question, especially in epidemiology and the philosophy of science. The debate has focused on whether the…

BACKGROUND: and overview. This article describes the different types of reviews of research that are available in the literature: systematic reviews and traditional reviews. Systematic reviews have become the reference standard for evidence to inform clinical practice. In this article, the authors set out guidance on a…

Systematic review and meta-analysis are widely accepted approaches for evaluating treatment effectiveness. Meta-analysis generally addresses statistical aspects of systematic reviews, such as the pooling of treatment effect sizes, assessment of heterogeneity, and statistical inference. To complement treatment effective…

The effect of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy on knee osteoarthritis (KOA) has been contradictory in previous meta-analyses. This umbrella review on published meta-analyses aimed to investigate the effect of MSCs and PRP on KOA. We systematically searched Scopus, PubMed, and Cochran…

BACKGROUND: Tuberculous pericarditis (TBP) can lead to serious consequences. Early diagnosis and treatment are very important for TBP, but early diagnosis is still very challenging. This study aims to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of Xpert MTB/RIF for TBP using meta-analysis method. METHODS: We will search Embase,…

BACKGROUND: A very large acceleration in clinical studies on the efficacy of fire needle to treat lumbar disc herniation (LDH) are increasing, while studies on the assessment of its efficacy are still lacking. Therefore, this study will demonstrate the efficacy of fire needle in the treatment of LDH combining with the…

INTRODUCTION: There are many injection methods for the treatment of knee osteoarthritis, but there is no comprehensive comparison, based on the fixed effect model. METHODS: According to the retrieval strategy, we searched randomized controlled trials (RCTs) randomly from PubMed, the Cochrane Library, Embase, the China…

BACKGROUND: The target of this study is to summarize the association between the serum lipoprotein levels and neurological function in patients with acute ischemic stroke. METHODS: A comprehensive search of Cochrane Library, PUBMED, EMBASE, Web of Science, and Chinese Biomedical Literature Database, China National Kno…

BACKGROUND: Crohn disease (CD) is associated with substantial healthcare related costs and impairment of quality of life. Tripterygium wilfordii Hook F (TwHF) is proved to be effective for CD in animal and human. However, there is no systemic review and meta-analysis regarding the clinical efficacy and safety of TwHF p…

It is widely recognised that findings from experimental studies should be replicated before their conclusions are accepted as definitive. In many research areas, synthesis of results from multiple studies is carried out via systematic review and meta-analysis. Some fields are also moving away from null hypothesis signi…

Copula mixed models for trivariate (or bivariate) meta-analysis of diagnostic test accuracy studies accounting (or not) for disease prevalence have been proposed in the biostatistics literature to synthesize information. However, many systematic reviews often include case-control and cohort studies, so one can either f…

Moment-based estimators of the between-study variance are very popular when performing random effects meta-analyses. This type of estimation has many advantages including computational and conceptual simplicity. Furthermore, by using these estimators in large samples, valid meta-analyses can be performed without the as…

Meta-analysis of gene expression has enabled numerous insights into biological systems, but current methods have several limitations. We developed a method to perform a meta-analysis using the elastic net, a powerful and versatile approach for classification and regression. To demonstrate the utility of our method, we…