392,164 papers found

BACKGROUND: the purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of sleep deprivation on semen analyses, hormone levels and testicular histopathology in men. METHODS: this review will be included in a qualified case-control study. The search strategy will be implemented in PubMed, Embase, Web of science, Cochrane lib…

BACKGROUND: Multiple intravitreal pharmacotherapies including different anti-vascular endothelial growth factors (VEGF), intravitreal steroids, and combined therapy with anti-VEGF and steroids are available for patients with macular edema secondary to retinal vein occlusion (RVO). However, the recommendation of multipl…

BACKGROUND: Malaria remains a global health threat for centuries. In recent years, a rising resistance of Plasmodium falciparum to current standard artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) leads to increasing treatment failures and requires for optimized treatment. Here, we intend to make a systematic review and…

BACKGROUND: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder. While bringing psychologic pain to patients, it also damages their social function, which is a great threat to people's life and health. Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies have been used clinically to treat PTSD; however, t…

BACKGROUND: Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been inconsistently associated with osteosarcoma (OS) risk. This meta-analysis aimed to synthesize relevant data on SNPs associated with OS. METHODS: Databases were searched to identify association studies of SNPs and OS published through January 2020 from the da…

BACKGROUND: Vasomotor symptoms (hot flashes or night sweats) are closely related to the impaired quality of life in menopausal women. Fenugreek is the ripe seed of Trigonella foenum graecum Linn. In China, this plant is used to relieve menopausal symptoms in women. Although recent studies have shown that fenugreek may…

Many systematic reviews and meta-analyses concern the effect of a healthcare intervention on a binary outcome. occurrence (or not) of a particular event. Usually, the overall effect, pooled across all studies included in the meta-analysis, is summarised using the odds ratio (OR) or the relative risk (RR). Under most ci…

BACKGROUND: Compound kushen injection is increasingly used to treat various cancers. However, its role in the management of multiple myeloma (MM) is still controversial and requires further clarification. The aim of this study is to evaluate efficacy and safety of compound kushen injection for MM through systematic rev…

Meta-analyses are conducted to synthesize the quantitative results of related studies. The random-effects meta-analysis model is based on the assumption that a distribution of true effects exists in the population. This distribution is often assumed to be normal with a mean and variance. The population variance, also c…

BACKGROUND: Neck pain is a common discomfort or more intense forms of pain in the cervical region. Neck pain has a large impact on individuals and their families, communities, healthcare systems, and businesses throughout the world. Therapeutic strategies are widely used for patients with neck pain in clinical practice…

BACKGROUND: Comparative efficacy and safety of different hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapies (HIPEC) in patients with advanced gastric cancer who underwent gastrectomy is unclear. To investigate this question, we conduct a systematic review and network meta-analysis. METHODS: The protocol followed Preferred Re…

AIM: Dose-response meta-analysis has been widely employed in evidence-based decision-making. Currently, the most popular approach is the one or two-stage generalized least squares for trend model. This approach however has some drawbacks, and therefore, we compare the latter with a one-stage robust error meta-regressio…

BACKGROUND: When conducting a meta-analysis of a continuous outcome, estimated means and standard deviations from the selected studies are required in order to obtain an overall estimate of the mean effect and its confidence interval. If these quantities are not directly reported in the publications, they must be estim…

Conventional meta-analysis estimators are weighted means of study measures, meant to estimate an overall population measure. For measures such as means, mean differences and risk differences, a weighted arithmetic mean is the conventional estimator. When the measures are ratios, such as odds ratios, logarithms of the s…

Availability of individual patient-level data (IPD) broadens the scope of network meta-analysis (NMA) and enables us to incorporate patient-level information. Although IPD is a potential gold mine in biomedical areas, methodological development has been slow owing to limited access to such data. In this paper, we propo…

This work is motivated by a meta-analysis case study on antipsychotic medications. The Michaelis-Menten curve is employed to model the nonlinear relationship between the dose and D2 receptor occupancy across multiple studies. An intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) is used to quantify the heterogeneity across studi…

Network meta-analysis (NMA)--a statistical technique that allows comparison of multiple treatments in the same meta-analysis simultaneously--has become increasingly popular in the medical literature in recent years. The statistical methodology underpinning this technique and software tools for implementing the methods…

This paper presents a Bayesian model for meta-analysis of sparse discrete binomial data, which are out of the scope of the usual hierarchical normal random-effect models. Treatment effectiveness data are often of this type. The crucial linking distribution between the effectiveness conditional on the healthcare center…

Combining multiple microarray datasets increases sample size and leads to improved reproducibility in identification of informative genes and subsequent clinical prediction. Although microarrays have increased the rate of genomic data collection, sample size is still a major issue when identifying informative genetic b…

Multiple treatment comparison (MTC) meta-analysis uses both direct (head-to-head) randomized clinical trial (RCT) evidence as well as indirect evidence from RCTs to compare the relative effectiveness of all included interventions. The methodological quality of MTCs may be difficult for clinicians to interpret because t…