392,509 papers found

Meta-analysis is commonly used in reviews of the effectiveness of medical technologies, but this approach has not been used in direct support of guidelines development groups. This paper describes the approach of the North of England Guidelines Development Project in describing the evidence using meta-analyses that wer…

The statistical issues in clinical trials where clusters, communities or groups rather than individuals are randomized are often not fully appreciated. In this paper we discuss the design and analysis of trials in which pairs of clusters are randomized in the context of one recent trial, the British Family Heart Study.…

The use of meta-analyses or overviews to combine formally the results of related randomised clinical trials is becoming increasingly common. However the distinction between analyses based on information extracted from the published literature and those based on collecting and reanalysing updated individual patient data…

This paper contains a proposition related to the publication of meta-analyses of clinical trials. We consider the situation where the results of a number of trials are summarized by a common or typical odds ratio. We show that stating such an odds ratio as the summary of evidence from a number of trials can be misleadi…

To evaluate the variability in the reported accuracy of the exercise electrocardiogram (ECG) for predicting severe coronary disease, meta analysis was applied to 60 consecutively published reports comparing exercise-induced ST depression with coronary angiographic findings. The 60 reports included 62 distinct study gro…

This study used meta-analysis, an analytical technique that uses raw data from previous researchers, to estimate the efficacy of screening for oral cancer with tolonium chloride (TCl). TCl, a vital blue dye, selectively stains acid tissue components such as DNA and RNA and has been used for more than 20 years by surgeo…

The Impostor Phenomenon (IP) is conceptually a continuous construct on a spectrum, rather than a categorical or definitive diagnosis. Therefore, reference to its 'prevalence' in the epidemiological sense may seem to be conceptually incorrect. That said, this does not rule out threshold-based prevalence estimates. There…

BACKGROUND: The exponential growth of biomedical literature challenges the feasibility, reproducibility, and bias control of diagnostic meta-analyses based on manual screening. METHODS: We propose a scalable framework integrating automated topic modeling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation, LDA) for thematic pre-screening wi…

The good news is that Bruns and colleagues' robust meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of individual Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for eating disorders has provided us with evidence congruent with other recent meta-analyses in this area. The emerging message, however, holds up an unflattering mirr…

PURPOSE: To investigate and implement semiautomated screening for meta-analyses (MA) in urology under consideration of class imbalance. METHODS: Machine learning algorithms were trained on data from three MA with detailed information of the screening process. Different methods to account for class imbalance (Sampling…

OBJECTIVES: To generate a bank of items describing application and interpretation errors that can arise in pairwise meta-analyses in systematic reviews of interventions. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: MEDLINE, Embase, and Scopus were searched to identify studies describing types of errors in meta-analyses. Descriptions of…

Assessing heterogeneity between studies is a critical step in determining whether studies can be combined and whether the synthesized results are reliable. Thestatistic has been a popular measure for quantifying heterogeneity, but its usage has been challenged from various perspectives in recent years. In particular, i…

To determine the suitability of network meta-analysis (NMA) using antibacterial treatment evidence in complicated urinary tract infection.We conducted a systematic literature review to identify published clinical trial data for complicated urinary tract infection treatments. We performed a feasibility assessment to det…