391,881 papers found

A literature search revealed 22 controlled clinical studies on the efficacy of acupuncture in three fields of addiction: cigarette smoking (15), heroin (five), and alcohol (two). These studies were reviewed using a list of 18 predefined criteria of good methodology. A maximum of 100 points for study design could be ear…

The result of a meta-analysis is conventionally pictured in the forest plot as a diamond, whose length is the 95% confidence interval (CI) for the summary measure of interest. The Diamond Ratio (DR) is the ratio of the length of the diamond given by a random effects meta-analysis to that given by a fixed effect meta-an…

Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWASs) has important advantages, but it assumes that studies are independent, which does not hold when there is relatedness between studies. As a motivating example, recent work suggested applying sex-stratified meta-analysis to correct for participation bias, without c…

An overview of the papers published in the last 10 years was performed to evaluate whether treatment with currently available drugs was beneficial in patients with primary IgA nephropathy (IgAN). Eight selected papers involving 196 IgAN patients with moderate or heavy proteinuria, associated in some cases with the neph…

Meta-analysis of 19 double-blind placebo-controlled trials of antidepressants (N = 13) and benzodiazepines (N = 6) for patients with panic disorders showed that active treatment had 25% greater success rate than placebo over a mean duration of 14 weeks. There were no statistically significant differences observed betwe…

BACKGROUND: Meta-analyses of clinical trial safety data have risen in importance beyond regulatory submissions. During drug development, sponsors need to recognize safety signals early and adjust the development program accordingly, so as to facilitate the assessment of causality. Once a product is marketed, sponsors a…

OBJECTIVE: Epidemiologic studies have reported conflicting results relating alcohol intake to bladder cancer risk. A meta-analysis of cohort and case-control studies was conducted to pool the risk estimates of the association between alcohol intake and bladder cancer. METHODS: Eligible studies were retrieved via both…

OBJECTIVES: This umbrella meta-analysis aimed to answer the clinical question: Do mini-screws and micro-implants improve specific orthodontic outcomes such as intermolar width, interpremolar width, suture expansion, molar movement, and skeletal width compared to conventional anchorage methods? MATERIALS AND METHODS: A…

OBJECTIVE: There is an ongoing debate how to interpret findings of meta-analyses when substantial clinical heterogeneity is present among included trials. The aim of the present study was to demonstrate various ways of dealing with clinical heterogeneity along with underlying assumptions and interpretation. A recent me…

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: In systematic reviews (SRs) with a meta-analysis, a subgroup analysis can be utilised to explore heterogeneity of treatment effects across patient characteristics and assess how patient characteristics, types of intervention, or trial characteristics modify the treatment effect. The aim of this m…

In this study all available clinical trials of antibiotic prophylaxis in biliary tract surgery, published from 1965 to 1988, were examined. Results of 42 randomized, controlled trials (4129 patients), in which a group of patients treated with antibiotics was compared with a group of patients not treated with antibiotic…

PURPOSE: Mistletoe treatment in cancer patients is controversial, and a Cochrane review concluded that due to heterogeneity, performing a meta-analysis was not suitable. However, several systematic reviews included meta-analyses in favor of mistletoe. The aim of this work was to assess the influence of the methodologic…

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of exercise therapy on neck pain (NP) levels, neck dysfunction, and quality of life in patients with nonspecific neck pain (NSNP), and to compare the differences between different exercise interventions, thereby providing evidence for the application of exerci…

OBJECTIVES: Evaluating the variation in the strength of the effect across studies is a key feature of meta-analyses. This variability is reflected by measures like τ(2) or I(2), but their clinical interpretation is not straightforward. A prediction interval is less complicated: it presents the expected range of t…

Several fluoroquinolones currently under investigation or on the market potentially interact with theophylline. In this study, meta-analysis methodology was used to evaluate the significance of findings from quinolone-theophylline interaction studies. Two major databases were searched: Index Medicus (from 1986 to March…

Artificial grammar learning (AGL) has become an important tool used to understand aspects of human language learning and whether the abilities underlying learning may be unique to humans or found in other species. Successful learning is typically assumed when human or animal participants are able to distinguish stimuli…

Many randomized trials evaluate an intervention effect on time-to-event outcomes. Individual participant data (IPD) from such trials can be obtained and combined in a so-called IPD meta-analysis (IPD-MA), to summarize the overall intervention effect. We performed a narrative literature review to provide an overview of…

Meta-analysis combines results from multiple longitudinal studies to describe life course variation by age and sex for quantity of drinking per typical occasion (20 studies) and frequency of drinking during one month (27 studies). There is cross-study heterogeneity for the Time 1 means of the drinking variables blockin…