381,523 papers found

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: If developed using rigorous methods and produced in a timely manner, clinical practice guidelines have the potential to improve patient outcomes. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the challenges involved in generating reliable clinical guidance, it has also provided an opportunity to add…

REVIEW OBJECTIVE: To synthesise the best available evidence on the effectiveness of interventions that have used autoregulated and individualised resistance training versus predetermined and standardised resistance training in treating any tendinopathy. INTRODUCTION: Recent evidence suggests that individualised exerci…

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of long fusion (LF) versus short fusion (SF) for the treatment of degenerative scoliosis (DS). METHODS: We will search MEDLINE, EMBASE, PubMed, the Cochrane Library, and Web of Science to collect the randomized and non-randomized contro…

Studies included in meta-analysis can produce results that depart from the true population parameter of interest due to systematic and/or random errors. Synthesis of these results in meta-analysis aims to generate an estimate closer to the true population parameter by minimizing these errors across studies. The inverse…

INTRODUCTION: The current work describes the protocol for a meta-integration investigating the positive aspects of providing care to someone living with dementia. We aim to understand the position of positive aspects in the caregiver experience as well as identify how positive aspects are commonly conceptualised, inves…

Jayne Tierney and colleagues offer guidance on how to spot a well-designed and well-conducted individual participant data meta-analysis.

Hypertension (HTN) is the leading cause of worldwide mortality and is responsible for approximately 40% of deaths from cardiovascular disease, chronicle kidney disease (CKD) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) according to the World Health Organization (WHO). It is known that about 80% of all mortality from cardiovascu…

Shieh (2013) discussed in detail δ*, a proposed standardized effect size measure for the two-independent-groups design with heteroscedasticity. Shieh focused on inference-notably, the large challenge of calculating confidence intervals for δ*. I contend, however, that the standardizer chosen for δ*, m…

A systematic review (SR) is an article on the «synthesis of the available evidence», in which a review is performed on the quantitative and qualitative aspects of primary studies, with the aim of summarising the existing information on a particular topic. After collecting the articles of interest the research…

There has been great recent interest in the medical and statistical literature in the assessment and validation of surrogate endpoints as proxies for clinical endpoints in medical studies. More recently, authors have focused on using metaanalytical methods for quantification of surrogacy. In this article, we extend exi…

The study of errors in medicine has proliferated since the publication of The Institute of Medicine Report 'TO ERR IS HUMAN' in 2000. Case nuances and process of care issues are valuable areas to explore if the goal is to provide the health care worker with the knowledge to avoid future errors. Meta-analysis and random…

The causes of manifest (strabismus) and latent (phoria) misalignment of the visual axes are incompletely understood. We calculated genetic and environmental contributions to strabismus based upon a critical review and quantitative meta-analysis of previous strabismus twin studies (n=3418 twin pairs) and calculated cont…

Medical decisions have to rely on evidence-based medicine. However, evidence is not a clearly defined term. Several evidence criteria have been proposed, yet statistical meta-analyses are considered to be core criterion of empirical studies in that they combine single evidence from different studies into an encompassin…

Non-replication and inconsistency had been common features in the search for common variants of candidate genes affecting the risk of complex diseases. They may continue to require attention in the current era, when massive hypothesis-free testing of genetic variants is feasible. An empirical evaluation of the early ex…

As the volume of biomedical information escalates and its uses diversify, systematic reviews and meta-analyses - the compilation, selection and statistical analysis of pooled results from similar studies - are becoming an increasingly accepted method in the evaluation of healthcare technologies and interventions. We th…

Ambitious programs have recently been advocated or launched to create genomewide databases for meta-analysis of association between DNA markers and phenotypes of medical and/or social concern. A necessary but not sufficient condition for success in association mapping is that the data give accurate estimates of both ge…

The increase in the number of published systematic reviews and meta-analyses over the last few years has highlighted the need to establish guidelines for their publication, in order to facilitate their interpretation and use. The Quality of Reporting of Meta-analyses Conference, which took place in 1996, resulted in th…

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Guidelines are supposed to be helpful in clinical practice. Guidelines are also supposed to rest upon the evidence that there is. In the field of clinical nutrition the problem is that many clinical trials are not conclusive because they are underpowered and sometimes have an inferior design. RECENT…

In the present issue of, Frank and Matthay review the physiologic mechanisms that lead to ventilator-induced lung injury. Our greater understanding of basic physiologic principles has already had a major impact on the treatment of critically ill patients. Novel strategies to limit ventilator-induced lung injury have no…

A CONTROVERSIAL SUBJECT: Several large randomised studies have demonstrated a reduction in mortality due to breast cancer of around 30% in women aged over 50, with the development of systematic mammography. There are data also suggesting an identical benefit in women aged 40 to 49, when screening is intensified. A rece…