382,077 papers found

BACKGROUND: Oropharyngeal dysphagia is a common disorder after stroke. Physical therapy has been widely used in the rehabilitation of patients with dysphagia after stroke. Due to the lack of randomized trials directly comparing the efficacy of various physical therapies directly, the relative efficacy of these methods…

INTRODUCTION: Lumbar spinal stenosis (LSS) is a common lumbar degenerative disease in the elderly, usually requiring surgery if conservative treatment fails. Microscopic decompressive laminectomy (MDL) and percutaneous endoscopic decompressive laminectomy (PEDL) have been widely used to treat LSS. This study aims to pr…

BACKGROUND: Infantile fever is a common symptom of the pediatric diseases, which is often caused by cold, food accumulation, or other pathogenic factors. Pediatric tuina is regarded as an acceptable non-pharmaceutical therapy for children with optimal effects, which has been widely used for infantile fever around China…

BACKGROUND: Superb microvascular imaging (SMI) is a novel Doppler technique that depicts low velocity blood flow without the use of a contrast agent. Studies suggested that SMI may or may not detect neovascularization of carotid plaque with accuracy comparable to contrast-enhanced ultrasound. To gain clarity, a meta-an…

BACKGROUND: Ulcerative colitis is a recurring digestive disease characterized by inflammation in the intestinal tract, which seriously affects the life of the patient. In recent years, it has played a role in obesity, osteoporosis, and gastrointestinal disorders, and has received more and more attention. However, there…

BACKGROUND: A number of studies have used regional homogeneity (ReHo) to depict local functional connectivity in chronic pain (CP). However, the findings from these studies were mixed and inconsistent. METHODS: A computerized literature search will be performed in PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, China National Knowled…

BACKGROUND: At present, accumulative attention has been paid to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) due to its global prevalence. Acupuncture may play a beneficial role in patients with breathlessness in COVID-19. This study is designed to determine the efficacy and safety of acupuncture for breathlessness in COVID-19.…

Clinical trial data collection still relies on a manual entry from information available in the medical record. This process introduces delay and error risk. Automating data transfer from Electronic Health Record (EHR) to Electronic Data Capture (EDC) system, under investigators' supervision, would gracefully solve the…

BACKGROUND: microRNAs have drawn more attention due to their function on the inflammatory process. The association between microRNA-21 (miR-21) expression and risk of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) remain inconclusive. This study was aimed to acquire a more exact estimation of this relationship. METHODS: Relevant s…

In recent times many researchers are expressing immense interest in nutraceuticals and functional foods for combating various diseases or abnormal conditions, especially against hypertension (HT). Persistent HT is medically referred to as chronic high blood pressure (BP) and considered to be one of the major risk facto…

When making treatment decisions, it is often necessary to consider the relative efficacy and safety of multiple potential interventions. Unlike traditional pairwise meta-analysis, which allows for a comparison between two interventions by pooling head-to-head data, network meta-analysis (NMA) allows for the simultaneou…

OBJECTIVE: Meta-analysing studies with low event rates is challenging as some of the standard methods for meta-analysis are not well suited to handle rare outcomes. This is more evident when some studies have zero events in one or both treatment groups. In this article, we discuss why rare events require special attent…

Detection of publication and related biases remains suboptimal and threatens the validity and interpretation of meta-analytical findings. When bias is present, it usually differentially affects small and large studies manifesting as an association between precision and effect size and therefore visual asymmetry of conv…

BACKGROUND: Vertebrobasilar insufficiency vertebrobasilar (VBIV) is a serious nerve disease and many old people suffer from it. Acupuncture has been widely applied in the treatment of VBIV. However, to our knowledge, there has been no systematic review or meta-analysis of randomized controlled trails regarding the effe…

Publication bias occurs when the statistical significance or direction of the results between published and unpublished studies differ after controlling for study quality, which threatens the validity of the systematic review and summary of the results on a research topic. Conclusions based on a meta-analysis of publis…

Publication bias is one of the most important issues in meta-analysis. For standard meta-analyses to examine intervention effects, the funnel plot and the trim-and-fill method are simple and widely used techniques for assessing and adjusting for the influence of publication bias, respectively. However, their use may be…

Linear mixed models are increasingly used for the analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of binary phenotypes because they can efficiently and robustly account for population stratification and relatedness through inclusion of random effects for a genetic relationship matrix. However, the utility of linear…

In recent years, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified many loci that are shared among common disorders and this has raised interest in pleiotropy. For performing appropriate analysis, several methods have been proposed, e.g. conducting a look-up in external sources or exploiting GWAS results by meta-a…

During the last decade, several meta-analytic studies employing different methodological approaches have had inconsistent conclusions regarding antidepressant efficacy. Herein, we aim to comment on methodological aspects that may have contributed to disparate findings. We initially discuss methodological inconsistencie…

MOTIVATION: Sharing genomic data is crucial to support scientific investigation such as genome-wide association studies. However, recent investigations suggest the privacy of the individual participants in these studies can be compromised, leading to serious concerns and consequences, such as overly restricted access t…