392,350 papers found

INTRODUCTION: Constipation is one of the most common complications in patients with stroke. Acupuncture has gained increased popularity for the management of constipation. However, there is a lack of supportive evidence on the efficacy of acupuncture for poststroke constipation. This systematic review aims to collect a…

This article describes conceptual advances of the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) working group guidance to evaluate the certainty of evidence (confidence in evidence, quality of evidence) from network meta-analysis (NMA). Application of the original GRADE guidance, published…

INTRODUCTION: Epidemiological evidence suggests that physical activity has a positive effect on reducing glycated haemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) levels not only in diabetics, but also in healthy subjects. Moreover, a positive association of HbA1c levels with cardiovascular disease and mortality in non-diabetic populations has…

BACKGROUND: Network meta-analysis, a method to synthesise evidence from multiple treatments, has increased in popularity in the past decade. Two broad approaches are available to synthesise data across networks, namely, arm- and contrast-synthesis models, with a range of models that can be fitted within each. There has…

BACKGROUND: Alcohol dependence is common and serious cause of social and physical harm. However, the optimal management of those with moderate and severe alcohol dependence in primary and community care after detoxification remains unclear. The aim of this review is to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions for ma…

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the trends, characteristics, and quality of systematic review and meta-analysis in general radiology journals. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We performed a PubMed search to identify systematic reviews and meta-analyses that had been carried out in the field of radiology between 2007 and…

INTRODUCTION: Stroke frequently results in balance disorders, leading to lower levels of activity and a diminution in autonomy. Current physical therapies (PT) aiming to reduce postural imbalance have shown a large variety of effects with low levels of evidence. The objectives are to determine the efficiency of PT in r…

INTRODUCTION: Tuberculosis (TB) continues to be a major public health issue worldwide, with 1.4 million deaths occurring annually. There is uncertainty regarding which factors are associated with in-hospital mortality among patients with pulmonary TB. This knowledge gap complicates efforts to identify and improve the m…

BACKGROUND: The management of osteoarthritis (OA) is unsatisfactory, as most treatments are not clinically effective over placebo and most drugs have considerable side effects. On average, 75 % of the analgesic effect from OA treatments in clinical trials can be attributed to a placebo response, and this response varie…

BACKGROUND: We address the problem of integratively analyzing multiple gene expression, microarray datasets in order to reconstruct gene-gene interaction networks. Integrating multiple datasets is generally believed to provide increased statistical power and to lead to a better characterization of the system under stud…

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS: To provide the final results from the REMODEL (randomized evaluation of maxillary antrostomy versus ostial dilation efficacy through long-term follow-up) full-study cohorts and perform meta-analyses of standalone balloon sinus dilation studies to explore long-term outcomes in a large patient samp…

There are many advantages to individual participant data meta-analysis for combining data from multiple studies. These advantages include greater power to detect effects, increased sample heterogeneity, and the ability to perform more sophisticated analyses than meta-analyses that rely on published results. However, a…

Missing outcome data are a common threat to the validity of the results from randomised controlled trials (RCTs), which, if not analysed appropriately, can lead to misleading treatment effect estimates. Studies with missing outcome data also threaten the validity of any meta-analysis that includes them. A conceptually…

In retrospective studies, odds ratio is often used as the measure of association. Under independent beta prior assumption, the exact posterior distribution of odds ratio given a single 2 × 2 table has been derived in the literature. However, independence between risks within the same study may be an…

BACKGROUND: Internationally recognized guidelines recommend the judicious use of low oxygen (21-30%), titrated to peripheral oxygen saturation targets, for the initiation of resuscitation of very and extremely preterm infants (<32 weeks' gestation). However, despite more than 10 randomized controlled trials on this que…

INTRODUCTION: Pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) continues to pose a significant global public health challenge and is associated with substantial physical, psychological and social burdens. Beyond traditional clinical outcomes, quality of life (QoL) has received increasing attention in PTB research and care because it refle…