392,240 papers found

The most important target of "evidence-based laboratory medicine(EBLM)", based on the fundamental concept of evidence-based medicine(EBM) is to improve appropriate, effective utilization of laboratory tests through close communication between clinical laboratories and clinicians. It is mandatory for clinicians to know…

Clinical evaluation of modern phytotherapy is mainly carried out today using the method of meta-analysis. These generally reveal a marked contradiction of the results of individual clinical studies. There are various hypotheses to explain this fact: in the first place the products used are often of a different chemical…

The number needed to treat (NNT) is an increasingly popular way of presenting the effects of treatment. However, the NNT varies markedly depending on the baseline risk of patients, the outcome considered, and the clinical setting. Furthermore geographic and secular trends make the NNT unstable between places and over t…

Quality aspects get more important in internal medicine due to novel technical developments and economic constraints. In spite of an extensive research activity in clinical medicine some research aspects of quality control are new. Among these are investigations about symptoms and complaints as well as risk factors. To…

Based on a meta-analysis of published studies, it has been estimated that approximately 10% of coronary artery disease cases are attributable to hyperhomocyst(e)inemia. It has also been calculated that food fortification with folate might reduce the number of cases of coronary artery disease in the United States by 50,…

Changes of causal inference concepts in medicine, especially those having to do with chronic diseases, were reviewed. The review is divided into five sections. First, several articles on the increased academic acceptance of observational research are cited. Second, the definitions of confounder and effect modifier conc…

Modern attempts to link intake of salt with population blood pressure (BP) show striking similarity to early 19th century attitudes which attributed human disease and premature death to inappropriate diet. Under these circumstances there is a danger that conviction of the truth of a hypothesis may lead to selection of…

General considerations about meta-analysis and the different steps of this technique are successively discussed: definition of the main objective, identification of the outcome, description of the retrieval and selection of trials, description of the statistical analysis and interpretation of the results. Advantages an…

Meta-analysis is essential for obtaining reproducible summaries of study results and valuable for discovering patterns among study results. A good meta-analysis will highlight and delineate the subjective components of these processes and vigorously search for sources of heterogeneity. Unfortunately, these objective ar…

Cross-design synthesis is a new (and still evolving) strategy for providing quantitative results that capture the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of different kinds of research. The strategy, which is being developed to answer questions about the effects of treatment in medical practice, includes (a) identifying…

This article describes a collection of meta-analysis techniques based on Bayesian statistics for interpreting, adjusting, and combining evidence to estimate parameters and outcomes important to the assessment of health technologies. The result of an analysis by the Confidence Profile Method is a joint posterior probabi…