392,597 papers found

Tolerance intervals provide a bracket intended to contain a percentage (e.g., 80%) of a population distribution given sample estimates of the mean and variance. In random-effects meta-analysis, tolerance intervals should contain researcher-specified proportions of underlying population effect sizes. Using Monte Carlo s…

While the biomedical community has published several "open data" sources in the last decade, most researchers still endure severe logistical and technical challenges to discover, query, and integrate heterogeneous data and knowledge from multiple sources. To tackle these challenges, the community has experimented with…

BACKGROUND: Rotator cuff tendinitis is a highly prevalent cause of shoulder pain and leads to decreased patient quality of life. Extracorporeal shock wave therapy (ESWT) and ultrasound-guided needling are considered beneficial for rotator cuff tendinitis. A systematic review and meta-analysis comparing ESWT with sham-E…

BACKGROUND: Excessive and prolonged uterine bleeding is an important obstacle for medical abortion to get popularized. Shenghua decoction (SHD) is widely used for treating uterine bleeding after early medical abortion. However, the clinical evidence is unclear. METHODS: Two researchers will dependently search literatu…

BACKGROUND: Home-based cardiac rehabilitation is considered as an alternative strategy of cardiac rehabilitation, aims to enhance patients participation rate. Since it emphasizes patients subjective initiative, patients require a better understanding of their illness and manage their conditions. We perform this systema…

BACKGROUND: Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been inconsistently associated with gastric cancer (GC) risk. This meta-analysis aimed to synthesize relevant data on SNPs associated with GC. METHODS: Databases were searched to identify association studies of SNPs and GC published through January 2020 from the…

In this paper we suggest a new Bayesian approach to network meta-analysis for the case of discrete multiple outcomes. The joint distribution of the discrete outcomes is modeled through a Gaussian copula with binomial marginals. The remaining elements of the hierarchial random effects model are specified in a standard w…

BACKGROUND: A large number of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have shown that traditional Chinese exercises (TCE) have certain advantages in the treatment of lumbar disc herniation (LDH). However, due to the diversity of TCE methods, their relative effectiveness has not been studied and explained. Therefore, based…

With availability of several different classes of biologic agents with variable efficacy and safety profiles for moderate-severe Crohn's disease (CD), positioning of different agents in treatment course is an important question for clinicians. Though in an ideal world, positioning would be personalized and driven by li…

The reduction of the mean or median bias of the maximum likelihood estimator in regular parametric models can be achieved through the additive adjustment of the score equations. In this paper, we derive the adjusted score equations for median bias reduction in random-effects meta-analysis and meta-regression models and…

MOTIVATION: In genetic association studies, meta-analyses are widely used to increase the statistical power by aggregating information from multiple studies. In meta-analyses, participating studies often share the same individuals due to the shared use of publicly available control data or accidental recruiting of the…

Meta-analysis based on individual participant data (IPD), often described as the 'gold standard' for effectiveness evidence synthesis, is increasingly being deployed despite being more resource intensive than collating study-level results. Its professed virtues include the ability to incorporate unreported data and to…

BACKGROUND: Gene regulatory relationships can be inferred using matched array comparative genomics and transcriptomics data sets from cancer samples. The way in which copy numbers of genes in cancer samples are often greatly disrupted works like a natural gene amplification/deletion experiment. There are now a large nu…

BACKGROUND: Network meta-analysis is used to compare three or more treatments for the same condition. Within a Bayesian framework, for each treatment the probability of being best, or, more general, the probability that it has a certain rank can be derived from the posterior distributions of all treatments. The treatme…

Statistical methods for sequential meta-analysis have applications also for the design of new trials. Existing methods are based on group sequential methods developed for single trials and start with the calculation of a required information size. This works satisfactorily within the framework of fixed effects meta-ana…

To deliver high-quality clinical care to patients with diabetes and other chronic conditions, clinicians must understand the evidence available from studies that have been performed to address important clinical management questions. In an evidence-based approach to clinical care, the evidence from clinical research sh…

BACKGROUND: Evaluating the performance of a new diagnostic test presents a challenge if the conventional "gold" standard is invasive, hazardous, or expensive, especially if that test has been supplanted in usual clinical practice by a "silver" standard test that is more acceptable and perhaps only slightly suboptimal.…

Over the last decade, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have become the standard tool for gene discovery in human disease research. While debate continues about how to get the most out of these studies and on occasion about how much value these studies really provide, it is clear that many of the strongest results…

Patients with schizophrenia frequently report cannabis use, yet its effects on neurocognitive functioning in this population are still unclear. This meta-analysis was conducted to determine the magnitude of effect of cannabis consumption on cognition in schizophrenia without the confounding effects of other co-morbid s…

Although microarray technology has revealed transcriptomic diversities underlining various cancer phenotypes, transcriptional programs controlling them have not been well elucidated. To decode transcriptional programs governing cancer transcriptomes, we have recently developed a computational method termed EEM, which s…