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Systematic reviews: how they work and how to use them
Author(s) -
Carlisle J. B.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
anaesthesia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.839
H-Index - 117
eISSN - 1365-2044
pISSN - 0003-2409
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2044.2007.05092.x
Subject(s) - medicine , systematic review , psychological intervention , intervention (counseling) , odds , meaning (existential) , work (physics) , meta analysis , medline , nursing , psychotherapist , psychology , pathology , mechanical engineering , logistic regression , political science , law , engineering
Summary At their best, systematic reviews should be the least biased summaries of the effect of healthcare interventions. However, authors can introduce both intended and unintended biases into systematic reviews. Results presented as odds ratios are often misinterpreted by readers as relative risks, meaning that the effect of the intervention is overestimated. Authors may analyse trials separately having mistaken differences in baseline risk for differences in the effect of an intervention and differences in effect between trials that have been analysed together may go undetected. In this article I discuss how a systematic review should work and how it can go wrong.