382,332 papers found

OBJECTIVES: An umbrella review is a systematic review of systematic reviews, which provides a tertiary level of evidence. This umbrella review of systematic reviews and meta-analysis (SR-MA) aimed to determine the proportion of oral cancer (OC) development in oral submucous fibrosis (OSF) patients. MATERIALS AND METHO…

PURPOSE: The previous analysis of systematic reviews and meta-analyses have illustrated that obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is correlated with multiple health outcomes. In the present research, our main aim was to execute an umbrella review to assess the available evidence for the associations between OSA and health out…

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia. We designed an umbrella review to systematically assess the epidemiological credibility of the associations of non-genetic factors with risk of AF. We searched PubMed and EMBASE from inception to December 31, 2018 to identify systematic reviews and meta-an…

OBJECTIVE: The objective of our study was to evaluate the methodological quality of systematic reviews and meta-analyses in Radiation Oncology. METHODS: A systematic literature search was conducted for all eligible systematic reviews and meta-analyses in Radiation Oncology from 1966 to 2015. Methodological characteris…

Proving the efficacy of a psychotropic drug is a medical, scientific and ethical need. Psychotropic drug development is now a highly complex process, which takes several years and which is very expensive. It involves multiple steps of preclinical and clinical pharmacological refinement and testing. Methodology of studi…

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses in dermatology provide high-level evidence for clinicians and policy makers that influence clinical decision making and treatment guidelines. One methodological problem with systematic reviews is the under representation of unpublished studies. This problem is due in part to publica…

ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL RELEVANCE: Meta-analysis (MA) on Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) trials is increasingly published and indexed in major international databases but their trustworthiness and clinical applicability is uncertain. We aimed to assess the characteristics and methodological quality of MA on CHM. MATERIALS…

OBJECTIVES: Estimation of between-study heterogeneity is problematic in small meta-analyses. Bayesian meta-analysis is beneficial because it allows incorporation of external evidence on heterogeneity. To facilitate this, we provide empirical evidence on the likely heterogeneity between studies in meta-analyses relating…

Evaluation of clinical prediction models across multiple clusters, whether centers or datasets, is becoming increasingly common. A comprehensive evaluation includes an assessment of the agreement between the estimated risks and the observed outcomes, also known as calibration. Calibration is of utmost importance for cl…

Network meta-analysis (NMA) combines evidence from multiple trials to compare the effectiveness of a set of interventions. In many areas of research, interventions are often complex, made up of multiple components or features. This makes it difficult to define a common set of interventions on which to perform the analy…

OBJECTIVES: Classical meta-analyses routinely treated studies with no events in both arms noninformative and excluded them from analyses. This study assessed whether such studies contain information and have an influence on the conclusions of meta-analyses. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: We collected meta-analyses of binar…

Threshold analysis has recently been proposed to be used in combination with the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) in order to assess the sensitivity to plausible bias of treatment recommendations derived from Bayesian network meta-analysis (NMA). Here, it was aimed to apply the…