382,077 papers found

BACKGROUND: Sepsis is a relatively common and deadly condition that constitutes a major challenge to the modern health care system. Quinolones are sometimes used in combination with beta-lactam antibiotics for sepsis, but no former systematic review has assessed the benefits and harms of quinolones in patients with sep…

BACKGROUND: Primary insomnia is one of the common sleep disorders. Auriculotherapy originated from traditional Chinese medicine, has been thought as a promising treatment for primary insomnia. We aim to evaluate the efficacy and safety of auriculotherapy for patients with primary insomnia through this systematic review…

BACKGROUND: Pain is very common and its management with a huge burden for patients and the healthcare system. And the network meta-analysis was designed to provide reference for the clinical practice. METHODS: PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane library, CNKI, VIP, Wan Fang, and CBM will be systematically searched their inceptio…

BACKGROUND: Depression is one of common disease in the female perimenopausal period. It deprives women of their right to work and live normally, and even destroys the happiness of their families. Acupuncture is a promising treatment for perimenopausal depression. METHODS: Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials…

BACKGROUND: Low back pain (LBP) is one of the most common symptoms prompting patients to seek treatment. In China, tuina is a common treatment for LBP, but its effects and safety remain uncertain. This protocol is to provide the methods used to assess the effectiveness and safety of tuina for the treatment of patients…

MOTIVATION: Due to the limited power of small-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS), researchers tend to collaborate and establish a larger consortium in order to perform large-scale GWAS. Genome-wide association meta-analysis (GWAMA) is a statistical tool that aims to synthesize results from multiple independen…

Pairwise and network meta-analysis (NMA) are traditionally used retrospectively to assess existing evidence. However, the current evidence often undergoes several updates as new studies become available. In each update recommendations about the conclusiveness of the evidence and the need of future studies need to be ma…

Meta-analysis, the methodology for analyzing the results from multiple independent studies, has grown tremendously in popularity over the last four decades. Although most meta-analyses involve a single effect size (summary result, such as a treatment difference) from each study, there are often multiple treatments of i…

BACKGROUND/AIMS: Amongst the many approaches to genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analysis (MA), the most popular methods are based on fixed-effects (FE) modeling because it tends to be the statistically most powerful approach in the absence of heterogeneity. However, FE-based MA ignores the potential heterogen…

BACKGROUND: In network meta-analysis, several alternative treatments can be compared by pooling the evidence of all randomised comparisons made in different studies. Incorporated indirect conclusions require a consistent network of treatment effects. An assessment of this assumption and of the influence of deviations i…

The Statistical Methods Group has played a pivotal role in The Cochrane Collaboration over the past 20 years. The Statistical Methods Group has determined the direction of statistical methods used within Cochrane reviews, developed guidance for these methods, provided training, and continued to discuss and consider new…

BACKGROUND: Cost-effectiveness analysis often requires information on the effectiveness of interventions on multiple outcomes, and commonly these take the form of competing risks. Nevertheless, methods for synthesis of randomized controlled trials with competing risk outcomes are limited. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this st…

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death among young adults. Both genetic and personality factors plausibly have a role on suicidal behavior. We focused on the catechol-O-methyltransferase gene (COMT) and we performed: a review of studies investigating the association between COMT and both suicidal behavior and pe…

Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) has been largely studied in relation to schizophrenia susceptibility. Most studies focused on the functional single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs4680 that causes a substitution of Val by Met at codon 158 of the COMT protein. Recent meta-analyses do not support an association betwe…

For bivariate meta-analysis of diagnostic studies, likelihood approaches are very popular. However, they often run into numerical problems with possible non-convergence. In addition, the construction of confidence intervals is controversial. Bayesian methods based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling could be us…

OBJECTIVE: Cumulative meta-analysis allows the evaluation of a study's contribution to the combined effect of the preceding research. It accrues evidence, gradually adding studies one at a time and provides updated estimates along with confidence intervals whenever new evidence emerges. In many research areas, a tempor…

The last decades have seen increased emphasis on the quality of training for direct-care staff serving people with intellectual disabilities. Nevertheless, it is unclear what the key aspects of effective training are. Therefore, the aim of the present meta-analysis was to establish the ingredients (i.e., goals, format,…

CONTEXT: Good systematic reviews/meta-analyses are important sources of information for clinicians, patients, government officials, and other decision makers. Now, there is an increasing number of systematic reviews/meta-analysis of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Thus, it is necessary to assess the quality of thes…

This review provides a critical analysis of the central nervous system effects of acute and chronic methamphetamine (MA) use, which is linked to numerous adverse psychosocial, neuropsychiatric, and medical problems. A meta-analysis of the neuropsychological effects of MA abuse/dependence revealed broadly medium effect…

The aim of the present study was to examine impairment of implicit learning in Parkinson's disease (PD) by means of a meta-analysis of studies that used the serial reaction time (SRT) task. The authors performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of published journal articles (1987-2005) that used the SRT task with…