Systematic reviews of adverse effects: framework for a structured approach

In the citing paper

“Nine articles (10%) made recommendations on how to perform data extraction [29, 33–35, 38, 43, 47, 48, 74], with publication dates between 1995 and 2016 (median year of publication 2009).”

In the citing paper

“As this is the first systematic review of the literature involving meditation adverse events (MAEs), we utilized the 'broad sweep' approach recommended by the Cochrane Adverse Effects Methods Group (27) in order to gain a general view of the variety of adverse events, as well as attempting a preliminary estimate of their prevalence.”

In the citing paper

“Twenty articles (22%) gave recommendations on the key item “research question” [29, 30, 35, 36, 38–43, 45–54], with publication dates between 1997 and 2015 (median year of publication 2009).”

In the citing paper

“Sixteen articles (17%) provided recommendations on the key item “protocol development” (Table 3), [29–44] with publication dates between 1994 and 2015 (median year of publication 2009).”

In the citing paper

“There was some disagreement (Table 4) whether the research question should be specific (narrowly formulated) [51, 53], or general (broadly formulated) [35, 47, 49].”

In the citing paper

“The articles recommended that the protocol should state the objectives, hypotheses to be tested and the rationale of the review, [29] and that it should describe eligibility criteria [29, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41], define the type of studies to be included [35, 37, 42, 44], and give the reason when including observational studies in the review [35, 37, 40].”

In the citing paper

“Thirty-three articles (35%) made recommendations about the key item “search strategy” [12, 29, 30, 33–36, 38, 39, 43, 46–51, 53–69], with publication dates between 1995 and 2016 (median year of publication 2007).”

In the citing paper

“The majority of articles discussed aspects general to systematic reviews including advantages and limitations of different literature sources and databases, search tools, the importance of identifying unpublished studies, literature searching techniques including how to build a search string and reporting [12, 29, 33–36, 46, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57, 59–62, 67, 68].”

In the citing paper

“Twenty-five (27%) articles gave recommendations on item “considering different study designs” [8, 29, 34, 35, 37–39, 42, 44, 49, 51, 56, 61, 65, 70, 73, 75, 76, 77–83], with publication dates between 1995 and 2016 (median year of publication 2007).”

In the citing paper

“Five articles discouraged combining different study designs in meta-analyses but saw the added value of including different designs in a systematic review [35, 38, 56, 61, 75].”

In the citing paper

“Most articles considered the combination of RCTs and non-randomised designs [29, 35, 38, 39, 49, 51, 56, 61, 75, 81].”

In the citing paper

“Authors agreed that combining different study designs in a meta-analysis can lead to misleading results if done without careful consideration [35, 38, 56, 70, 75, 76].”

In the citing paper

“The need for complete reporting of all relevant methodological aspects as a prerequisite to assessing the risk of bias of studies was highlighted in 10 articles, [16, 33, 35, 47, 50, 56, 86, 87, 90, 91] and was the focus of recommendations in a publication from the Meta-analysis Of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (MOOSE) group [12].”

In the citing paper

“Thirty-nine articles (42%) made recommendations on the assessment of quality and risk of bias of individual studies, [12, 16, 29, 30, 32–35, 37, 38, 43, 47–50, 52–54, 56, 64–66, 70, 71, 73, 75, 77, 82, 84–94] with publication dates between 1994 and 2016 (median year of publication 2009).”

In the citing paper

“Fifty-two articles (56%), provided recommendations on the statistical analysis in the context of meta-analysis of observational studies [8, 12, 16, 29–31, 33–36, 38, 41–44, 47, 48, 52, 54–56, 61, 66, 70, 72, 73, 77, 79–83, 85, 87, 96, 100, 101, 103–105, 107–118], with publication dates between 1994 and 2016 (median year of publication 2006).”

In the citing paper

“Authors recommended not to pool if heterogeneity is too high [35, 38, 47, 85, 103], and use statistical measures of heterogeneity to choose between random-effects (in case of heterogeneity) and fixed-effect models [55, 66].”