The Journal of antimicrobial chemotherapy
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J. Antimicrob. Chemother. · May 2008
Profound effect of study design factors on ventilator-associated pneumonia incidence of prevention studies: benchmarking the literature experience.
The ventilator-associated pneumonia incident proportion (VAP-IP) is highly variable among control groups of studies of methods for its prevention. The objective here is to develop and validate a literature-derived benchmark against which these groups can be profiled. ⋯ Study design factors such as concurrency and study size have potentially greater influence on the VAP-IP than do the VAP prevention methods under study. The outlier status of control groups were inapparent in the individual studies and the meta-analyses and yet would have confounded the estimates of treatment effect.