392,164 papers found

This article continues a series of reports on recent research developments in the field of heart failure. Key presentations made at the European Society of Cardiology Heart Failure Update meeting, held in Wroclaw, Poland, in June 2004 are reported. The SHAPE study identified a need to educate general practitioners (GPs…

Accurate and complete safety data are indispensable for the proper evaluation of the benefit-to-harm ratio of medical interventions. We evaluated whether a systematic review and meta-analysis of standardized safety data is feasible by requesting information on side effects directly from the investigators of all 38 anti…

Meta-analyses are being undertaken in an increasing diversity of diseases and conditions, some of which involve outcomes measured on an ordered categorical scale. We consider methodology for undertaking a meta-analysis on individual patient data for an ordinal response. The approach is based on the proportional odds mo…

We applied a mixed effects model to investigate between- and within-study variation in improvement rates of 180 schizophrenia outcome studies. The between-study variation was explained by the fixed study characteristics and an additional random study effect. Both rate difference and logit models were used. For a binary…

For meta-analysis, substantial uncertainty remains about the most appropriate statistical methods for combining the results of separate trials. An important issue for meta-analysis is how to incorporate heterogeneity, defined as variation among the results of individual trials beyond that expected from chance, into sum…

OBJECTIVES: Head injury is a common event. Most patients sustain a mild head injury (MHI), and management depends on the risk of an intracranial haemorrhage (ICH). The value of a plain skull radiograph as a screening tool for ICH is controversial. The aim of this meta-analysis was to estimate and explain differences in…

The identification of heterogeneity in effects between studies is a key issue in meta-analyses of observational studies, since it is critical for determining whether it is appropriate to pool the individual results into one summary measure. The result of a hypothesis test is often used as the decision criterion. In thi…

Overviews that combine single effect estimates from published studies generally use a summary statistic approach where the effect of interest is first estimated within each study and then averaged across studies in an appropriately weighted manner. Combining multiple regression coefficients from publications is more pr…

Systematic reviews have a central role in evidence-based medicine. The quantitative systematic review, also known as meta-analysis, provides a logical structure for quantifying evidence and for exploring bias and diversity in research systematically. It is essential that clinicians, educators, and researchers understan…

We have applied meta-analysis to investigate the relationship between birth place and the likelihood of neonatal survival, for infants of low birth weight (less than 2501 grams) in a series of 19 non-randomized studies. This paper illustrates the utility meta-analysis in evaluating medical technologies described in non…

Intermediate thickness (0.76-1.69 mm) clinical stage I melanomas at BANS locations (upper Back, posterior Arm, posterior Neck, posterior Scalp) were initially reported to have worse prognosis than similar thickness lesions at other subsites. Subsequent investigation did not support this observation. We re-examined the…

INTRODUCTION: Hand expression is a manual method of milk expression that requires no equipment and is commonly used in the early postpartum period, particularly when direct breastfeeding is not possible or not effective. Randomised trials have reported mixed findings across different maternal-infant contexts. This revi…

INTRODUCTION: Adenoid hypertrophy (AH) is a prevalent otolaryngological condition that primarily affects children aged 3-10 years and may adversely impact their growth and development. The choice of treatment largely hinges on the severity of hypertrophy. Currently, the main diagnostic modalities for AH include nasal e…

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are considered the highest level of evidence, but their reliability can be undermined by publication bias. Traditional methods for assessing publication bias, such as funnel plots and p-value-based tests (e.g., Egger test), have notable limitations, including reliance on subjective…

Propensity score adjustment addresses confounding by balancing covariates in subject treatment groups through matching, stratification, or weighting. Diagnostics test the success of adjustment. For example, if the standardized mean difference (SMD) for a relevant covariate exceeds a threshold like 0.1, the covariate is…

BACKGROUND: Random-effects meta-analysis models account for between-study heterogeneity by estimating and incorporating the heterogeneity variance parameter. Numerous estimators forhave been proposed, but no widely accepted guidance exists on when to best use which heterogeneity variance estimator. Especially in the co…

OBJECTIVES: In meta-analyses with few studies, between-study heterogeneity is poorly estimated. The Hartung and Knapp (HK) correction and the prediction intervals can account for the uncertainty in estimating heterogeneity and the range of effect sizes we may encounter in future trials, respectively. The aim of this st…

In this editorial, we discuss the article in the. The article conducts a meta-analysis of the diagnostic accuracy of the urea breath test (UBT), a non-invasive method for detecting(infection in humans. It is based on radionuclide-labeled urea. Various methods, both invasive and non-invasive, are available for diagnosin…

INTRODUCTION: Transversus abdominis plane (TAP) blocks are commonly used for postoperative analgesia after various abdominal surgeries. There are several different approaches for performing TAP blocks, mainly including posterior, lateral and subcostal approaches. An increasing number of randomised controlled trials (RC…

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the risk of bias due to missing evidence in a sample of published meta-analyses of nutrition research using the Risk Of Bias due to Missing Evidence (ROB-ME) tool and determine inter-rater agreement in assessments. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: We assembled a random sample of 42 meta-analyses of nu…