Bmc Med Res Methodol
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Bmc Med Res Methodol · Dec 2018
Methods for trustworthy nutritional recommendations NutriRECS (Nutritional Recommendations and accessible Evidence summaries Composed of Systematic reviews): a protocol.
Recent systematic reviews and editorials suggest that many organizations that produce nutritional guideline recommendations do not adhere to internationally recognized standards set forth by the Institute of Medicine (IoM), Guidelines International Network (GIN), Appraisal of Guidelines Research and Evaluation (AGREE), and Grading Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE). ⋯ Adhering to international guideline standards, conducting high quality systematic reviews, and actively assessing the values and preferences of key stakeholders is expected to improve the quality of nutritional guidelines and their relevance to end-users, particularly patients and community members. We will send our work for peer review, and if found acceptable, we will publish our nutritional recommendations in top-tier general medicine journals.
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Bmc Med Res Methodol · Dec 2018
Protocol for the development of a core outcome set for pelvic girdle pain, including methods for measuring the outcomes: the PGP-COS study.
Pelvic Girdle Pain (PGP) is an important cause of disability and economic cost worldwide. There is a need for effective preventative and management strategies. Emerging studies measure a variety of outcomes rendering synthesis and translation to clinical practice difficult. A Core Outcome Set (COS) can address this problem by ensuring that data are relevant, useful and usable for making well-informed healthcare choices. The aim of this study is to develop a consensus-based PGP-COS, including agreement on methods (e.g. instruments) for measuring the construct outcomes in the COS for use in research and clinical practice. Furthermore, as there is uncertainty as to whether incorporating stakeholder interviews in addition to conducting a systematic review to determine an initial list of outcomes for the Delphi survey, or, whether using different rating scales in a Delphi survey impacts on the final COS, we propose to embed two methodological studies within the PGP-COS development process to address these questions. ⋯ This PGP-COS was registered with COMET (Core Outcome Measures for Effectiveness Trials) in January 2017 ( http://www.comet-initiative.org/studies/details/958 ).
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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.