Systematic Reviews in Health Care

Systematic Reviews in Health Care: Meta-Analysis in Context [Hardcover]

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Systematic Reviews in Health Care: Meta-Analysis in Context
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The second edition of this best-selling book has been thoroughly revised and expanded to reflect the significant changes and advances made in systematic reviewing. New features include discussion on the rationale, meta-analyses of prognostic and diagnostic studies and software, and the use of systematic reviews in practice.

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• Hardcover: 506 pages
• Publisher: BMJ Books; 2 edition (March 5, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 072791488X
• ISBN-13: 978-0727914880
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #431,274 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #27 in Books > Textbooks > Medicine & Health Sciences > Medicine > Special Topics > Essays

Foreword.

Introduction:.

Rationale, potentials and promise of systematic review.

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Part I: Systematic reviews of controlled trials.

Principles and procedures.

Problems and limitations.

Identifying randomised trials.

Assessing the quality of controlled clinical trials.

Obtaining individual patient data from randomised controlled trials.

Assessing the quality of reports of systematic reviews.

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Part II: Investigating variability within and between studies.

Going beyond the grand mean.

Why and how sources of heterogeneity should be investigated.

Analysing the relationship between treatment benefit and underlying risk.

Investigating and dealing with publication and other biases.

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Part III: Systematic review of observational studies.

Systematic reviews of observational studies.

Systematic reviews of prognostic studies.

Systematic reviews of evaluations of diagnostic studies.

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Part IV: Statistical method and computer software.

Statistical methods of examining heterogeneity and combining results from several studies.

Choice of effect measure for binary outcomes.

Meta-analysis software.

Meta-analysis in STATA.

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Part V: Using systematic reviews in practice.

Applying the results of systematic reviews at the bedside.

Numbers needed to treat derived from meta-analysis: pitfalls and cautions.

Using systematic reviews in clinical guidelines development.

Using systematic reviews for evidence based policy making.

Using systematic reviews for economic evaluation.

Using systematic reviews and registers of ongoing trials for scientific and ethical trial design.

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Part VI: The Cochrane Collaboration.

The Cochrane Collaboration in the 20th Century.

The Cochrane Collaboration in the 21st Century: ten challenges and one reason whey they must be met.

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Part VII: Future challenges.

Unresolved issues and future developments

This book is written to be understood and used. Everything is easily accessible, even for the relatively innumerate, and presented in clear, easy English. The authors are to be congratulated on excellent pedagogical prose.

The major downside was a skinny statistical section that lacked depth (what was present was VERY clear however). Since the majority of the book is low-level, big-picture explanations of the principles of meta-analysis, I think that an expanded statistical section would not detract. In fact, because the rest of the book is so well explained, I suspect that most readers would have a good appetite for implementing the ideas presented. Those not inclined to read more details on implementation could just skip this section. In particular, I wished the authors had discussed how to combine simple proportions and rates across studies. This is arguably the simplest form of meta-analysis and the one for which nearly no advice exists to guide practise! There are tons of ways to transform and combine rates/proportions and these should have been developed, compared and constrasted for different scenarios. Similarly, I wish that even more Bayesian methods would be presented.

Lastly, the software section is old. New ideas using R, Revman, Bugs and other FREE software should be encouraged. Software that costs big dollars is probably not the best thing to present in an international book. Everyone should be able to reproduce the results at their home. Free software ensures this.

By Brant Inman

This classic book by the legendary experts in meta-analysis and systematic review, Mattias Egger, George Davey Smith, and Doug Altman, is considered the most pre-eminent and most definitive textbook in this area. No other books can compare! Very easy to read with clear explanations, this is the most trusty reference textbook to own when doing systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

By E. Ding

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