Bmc Med Res Methodol
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Bmc Med Res Methodol · Nov 2018
Exploring reporting quality of systematic reviews and Meta-analyses on nursing interventions in patients with Alzheimer's disease before and after PRISMA introduction.
Systematic reviews (SRs) and meta-analyses (MAs) are distillation of current best available evidence, but are potentially prone to bias. The bias of SRs and MAs comes from sampling bias, selection bias and within study bias. So, their reporting quality is especially important as it may directly influence their utility for clinicians, nurses, patients and policy makers. The SRs and MAs on nursing interventions in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) have been increasingly published over the past decade, but the reporting quality of article has not been evaluated after the introduction of Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta Analyses (PRISMA) Statement. ⋯ Since the publication of the PRISMA Statement, there has been an improvement in the quality of reporting of SRs and MAs on nursing interventions in patients with AD. More endorsement by journals of the report guideline for SRs/MAs may improve articles reporting quality, and the dissemination of reliable evidence to nurses. We recommend authors, readers, reviewers, and editors to become more acquainted with and to more strictly adhere to the PRISMA checklist.
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Bmc Med Res Methodol · Nov 2018
Improving the quality of reporting of systematic reviews of dose-response meta-analyses: a cross-sectional survey.
Dose-response meta-analysis (DRMA) is a useful tool to investigate potential dose-response relationship between certain exposure or intervention and the outcome of interest. A large number of DRMAs have been published in the past several years. However, the standard of reporting for such studies is not known. ⋯ The reporting of SR-DRMAs needs to be further improved, particularly in the issues refer to the methods. The quality of reporting may improve when involving more authors and methodologists and employing any reporting guidelines.
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Bmc Med Res Methodol · Nov 2018
Meta AnalysisPrognostic models for intracerebral hemorrhage: systematic review and meta-analysis.
Prognostic tools for intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) patients are potentially useful for ascertaining prognosis and recommended in guidelines to facilitate streamline assessment and communication between providers. In this systematic review with meta-analysis we identified and characterized all existing prognostic tools for this population, performed a methodological evaluation of the conducting and reporting of such studies and compared different methods of prognostic tool derivation in terms of discrimination for mortality and functional outcome prediction. ⋯ Prognostic tools for ICH discriminated well for mortality and functional outcome in derivation studies but methodological issues require confirmation of these findings in validation studies. Logistic regression based risk scores are particularly promising given their good performance and ease of application.
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Network meta-analysis is an extension of the classical pairwise meta-analysis and allows to compare multiple interventions based on both head-to-head comparisons within trials and indirect comparisons across trials. Bayesian or frequentist models are applied to obtain effect estimates with credible or confidence intervals. Furthermore, p-values or similar measures may be helpful for the comparison of the included arms but related methods are not yet addressed in the literature. In this article, we discuss how hypothesis testing can be done in a Bayesian network meta-analysis. ⋯ Test decisions can be based on the proposed index. The index may be a valuable complement to the commonly reported results of network meta-analyses. The method is easy to apply and of no (noticeable) additional computational cost.