Articles

Outcome choice and definition in systematic reviews leads to few eligible studies included in meta-analyses: a case study

There is broad recognition of the importance of evidence in informing clinical decisions. When information from all studies included in a systematic review (“review”) does not contribute to a meta-analysis, de...

Authors: Ian J. Saldanha, Kristina B. Lindsley, Sarah Money, Hannah J. Kimmel, Bryant T. Smith and Kay Dickersin

Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) in evidence synthesis: how the PatMed study approached embedding audience responses into the expression of a meta-ethnography

Patient and public involvement (PPI) has become enshrined as an important pillar of health services empirical research, including PPI roles during stages of research development and analysis and co-design appr...

Authors: S. Park, N. Khan, F. Stevenson and A. Malpass

Comparison of different rating scales for the use in Delphi studies: different scales lead to different consensus and show different test-retest reliability

Consensus-orientated Delphi studies are increasingly used in various areas of medical research using a variety of different rating scales and criteria for reaching consensus. We explored the influence of using...

Authors: Toni Lange, Christian Kopkow, Jörg Lützner, Klaus-Peter Günther, Sascha Gravius, Hanns-Peter Scharf, Johannes Stöve, Richard Wagner and Jochen Schmitt

Correction to: Challenges of one-year longitudinal follow-up of a prospective, observational cohort study using an anonymised database: recommendations for trainee research collaboratives

In the original publication of this article [1], the author should be only the collaboration group “STARSurg Collaborative”.

Authors:

Charting the landscape of graphical displays for meta-analysis and systematic reviews: a comprehensive review, taxonomy, and feature analysis

Data-visualization methods are essential to explore and communicate meta-analytic data and results. With a large number of novel graphs proposed quite recently, a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of availabl...

Authors: Michael Kossmeier, Ulrich S. Tran and Martin Voracek

Novel citation-based search method for scientific literature: a validation study

We recently developed CoCites, a citation-based search method that is designed to be more efficient than traditional keyword-based methods. The method begins with identification of one or more highly relevant ...

Authors: A. Cecile J. W. Janssens, Marta Gwinn, J. Elaine Brockman, Kimberley Powell and Michael Goodman

Framework for personalized prediction of treatment response in relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis

Personalized healthcare promises to successfully advance the treatment of heterogeneous neurological disorders such as relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis by addressing the caveats of traditional healthcare...

Authors: E. Stühler, S. Braune, F. Lionetto, Y. Heer, E. Jules, C. Westermann, A. Bergmann and P. van Hövell

Why do you need a biostatistician?

The quality of medical research importantly depends, among other aspects, on a valid statistical planning of the study, analysis of the data, and reporting of the results, which is usually guaranteed by a bios...

Authors: Antonia Zapf, Geraldine Rauch and Meinhard Kieser

A systematic review of methodology used in the development of prediction models for future asthma exacerbation

Clinical prediction models are widely used to guide medical advice and therapeutic interventions. Asthma is one of the most common chronic diseases globally and is characterised by acute deteriorations. These ...

Authors: Joshua Bridge, John D. Blakey and Laura J. Bonnett

Validation of the French version of the Vulnerable Elders Survey-13 (VES-13)

Identifying and assessing degree and type of frailty among older persons is a major challenge when targeting high risk populations to identify preventive interventions. The Vulnerable Elders Survey-(VES-13) is...

Authors: Joël Belmin, Lyamna Khellaf, Sylvie Pariel, Witold Jarzebowski, Lucie Valembois, John Zeisel and Carmelo Lafuente-Lafuente

Homogeneity score test of AC₁ statistics and estimation of common AC₁ in multiple or stratified inter-rater agreement studies

Cohen’s κ coefficient is often used as an index to measure the agreement of inter-rater determinations. However, κ varies greatly depending on the marginal distribution of the target population and overestimates ...

Authors: Chikara Honda and Tetsuji Ohyama

Development of A Guideline for Reporting Mediation Analyses (AGReMA)

There are a growing number of studies using mediation analysis to understand the mechanisms of health interventions and exposures. Recent work has shown that the reporting of these studies is heterogenous and ...

Authors: Aidan G. Cashin, James H. McAuley, Sarah E. Lamb, Sally Hopewell, Steven J. Kamper, Christopher M. Williams, Nicholas Henschke and Hopin Lee

Development and preliminary validation of a brief nurses’ perceived professional benefit questionnaire (NPPBQ)

With the increased empirical interest in the positive significance of improving nurses’ sense of professional benefits, there is a requirement for measures of nurses’ perceived professional benefit (NPPB). Our...

Authors: Yanli Hu, Jing Hu, Liping Li, Bin Zhao, Xiaohong Liu and Fan Li

Methods of competing risks flexible parametric modeling for estimation of the risk of the first disease among HIV infected men

Patients infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) are susceptible to many diseases. In these patients, the occurrence of one disease alters the chance of contracting another. Under such circumstanc...

Authors: Sahar Nouri, Mahmood Mahmoudi, Kazem Mohammad, Mohammad Ali Mansournia, Mahdi Yaseri and Noori Akhtar-Danesh

Flexible age-period-cohort modelling illustrated using obesity prevalence data

Use of generalized linear models with continuous, non-linear functions for age, period and cohort makes it possible to estimate these effects so they are interpretable, reliable and easily displayed graphicall...

Authors: Annette Dobson, Richard Hockey, Hsiu-Wen Chan and Gita Mishra

Sample size issues in time series regressions of counts on environmental exposures

Regression analyses of time series of disease counts on environmental determinants are a prominent component of environmental epidemiology. For planning such studies, it can be useful to predict the precision ...

Authors: Ben G. Armstrong, Antonio Gasparrini, Aurelio Tobias and Francesco Sera

A methodological quality assessment of systematic reviews and meta-analyses of antidepressants effect on low back pain using updated AMSTAR

Antidepressants are prescribed widely to manage low back pain. There are a number of systematic reviews and meta-analyses which have investigated the efficacy of the treatments, while the methodological qualit...

Authors: Mohammad Hossein Panahi, Mostafa Mohseni, Razieh Bidhendi Yarandi and Fahimeh Ramezani Tehrani

Using research networks to generate trustworthy qualitative public health research findings from multiple contexts

Qualitative research networks (QRNs) bring together researchers from diverse contexts working on multi-country studies. The networks may themselves form a consortium or may contribute to a wider research agend...

Authors: Lot Nyirenda, Meghan Bruce Kumar, Sally Theobald, Malabika Sarker, Musonda Simwinga, Moses Kumwenda, Cheryl Johnson, Karin Hatzold, Elizabeth L. Corbett, Euphemia Sibanda and Miriam Taegtmeyer

Integrated Care Search: development and validation of a PubMed search filter for retrieving the integrated care research evidence

Integrated care is an increasingly important principle for organising healthcare. Integrated care models show promise in reducing resource wastage and service fragmentation whilst improving the accessibility, ...

Authors: Raechel A. Damarell, Suzanne Lewis, Camilla Trenerry and Jennifer J. Tieman

The TRANSFER Approach for assessing the transferability of systematic review findings

Systematic reviews are a key input to health and social welfare decisions. Studies included in systematic reviews often vary with respect to contextual factors that may impact on how transferable review findin...

Authors: Heather Munthe-Kaas, Heid Nøkleby, Simon Lewin and Claire Glenton

A systematic survey of randomised trials that stopped early for reasons of futility

Randomised trial protocols may incorporate interim analyses, with the potential to stop the study for futility if early data show insufficient promise of a treatment benefit. Previously, we have shown that thi...

Authors: S. D. Walter, H. Han, G. H. Guyatt, D. Bassler, N. Bhatnagar, V. Gloy, S. Schandelmaier and M. Briel

A computational method to quantitatively measure pediatric drug safety using electronic medical records

Drug safety in children is a major concern; however, there is still a lack of methods for quantitatively measuring, let alone to improving, drug safety in children under different clinical conditions. To asses...

Authors: Gang Yu, Xian Zeng, Shaoqing Ni, Zheng Jia, Weihong Chen, Xudong Lu, Jiye An, Huilong Duan, Qiang Shu and Haomin Li

A modified Delphi study to identify the features of high quality measurement plans for healthcare improvement projects

The design and execution of measurement in quality improvement (QI) initiatives is often poor. Better guidance on “what good looks like” might help to mitigate some of the problems. We report a consensus-build...

Authors: Thomas Woodcock, Yewande Adeleke, Christine Goeschel, Peter Pronovost and Mary Dixon-Woods

Software tools to support title and abstract screening for systematic reviews in healthcare: an evaluation

Systematic reviews are vital to the pursuit of evidence-based medicine within healthcare. Screening titles and abstracts (T&Ab) for inclusion in a systematic review is an intensive, and often collaborative, st...

Authors: Hannah Harrison, Simon J. Griffin, Isla Kuhn and Juliet A. Usher-Smith

Validity and bias on the online active Australia survey: activity level and participant factors associated with self-report bias

This study examined the criterion validity of the online Active Australia Survey, using accelerometry as the criterion, and whether self-report bias was related to level of activity, age, sex, education, body ...

Authors: Rachel G. Curtis, Timothy Olds, Ronald Plotnikoff, Corneel Vandelanotte, Sarah Edney, Jillian Ryan and Carol Maher

Reliability and validity of a sedentary behavior questionnaire for South American pediatric population: SAYCARE study

Multicenter studies from Europe and the United States have developed specifically standardized questionnaires for assessing and comparing sedentary behavior, but they cannot be directly applied for South Ameri...

Authors: Augusto César Ferreira De Moraes, Marcus Vinícius Nascimento-Ferreira, Claudia Lucia de Moraes Forjaz, Juan Carlos Aristizabal, Leticia Azzaretti, Walter Viana Nascimento Junior, Maria L. Miguel-Berges, Estela Skapino, Carlos Delgado, Luis A. Moreno and Heráclito Barbosa Carvalho

Comparison of Bayesian and frequentist group-sequential clinical trial designs

There is a growing interest in the use of Bayesian adaptive designs in late-phase clinical trials. This includes the use of stopping rules based on Bayesian analyses in which the frequentist type I error rate ...

Authors: Nigel Stallard, Susan Todd, Elizabeth G. Ryan and Simon Gates

LEVEL (Logical Explanations & Visualizations of Estimates in Linear mixed models): recommendations for reporting multilevel data and analyses

Authors: Maria Jose Monsalves, Ananta Shrikant Bangdiwala, Alex Thabane and Shrikant Ishver Bangdiwala

Best practices for collecting repeated measures data using text messages

Researchers and clinicians use text messages to collect data with the advantage of real time capture when compared with standard data collection methods. This article reviews project setup and management for s...

Authors: Noa’a Shimoni, Siripanth Nippita and Paula M. Castaño

Clinical risk prediction with random forests for survival, longitudinal, and multivariate (RF-SLAM) data analysis

Clinical research and medical practice can be advanced through the prediction of an individual’s health state, trajectory, and responses to treatments. However, the majority of current clinical risk prediction...

Authors: Shannon Wongvibulsin, Katherine C. Wu and Scott L. Zeger

Using data linkage to enhance the reporting of cancer outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in NSW, Australia

Aboriginal people are known to be under-recorded in routinely collected datasets in Australia. This study examined methods for enhancing the reporting of cancer incidence among Aboriginal people using linked d...

Authors: Hanna E. Tervonen, Stuart Purdie and Nicola Creighton

Why do participants drop-out: findings from a prospective pediatric cohort for fever surveillance established at Vellore, southern India

Cohort studies are pivotal in understanding the natural history, and to thereby determine the incidence of a disease. The conduct of large-scale community-based cohort studies is challenging with reference to ...

Authors: Kulandaipalayam Natarajan Sindhu, Manikandan Srinivasan, Sathyapriya Subramaniam, Anita Shirley David, Venkata Raghava Mohan, Jacob John and Gagandeep Kang

Reporting guideline for priority setting of health research (REPRISE)

Research priority setting with stakeholders can help direct the limited resources for health research toward priority areas of need. Ensuring transparency of the priority setting process can strengthen legitim...

Authors: Allison Tong, Anneliese Synnot, Sally Crowe, Sophie Hill, Andrea Matus, Nicole Scholes-Robertson, Sandy Oliver, Katherine Cowan, Mona Nasser, Soumyadeep Bhaumik, Talia Gutman, Amanda Baumgart and Jonathan C. Craig

A patient-centered composite endpoint weighting technique for orthopaedic trauma research

This study aimed to address the current limitations of the use of composite endpoints in orthopaedic trauma research by quantifying the relative importance of clinical outcomes common to orthopaedic trauma pat...

Authors: Ugochukwu N. Udogwu, Andrea Howe, Katherine Frey, Marckenley Isaac, Daniel Connelly, Dimitrius Marinos, Mitchell Baker, Renan C. Castillo, Gerard P. Slobogean, Robert V. O’Toole and Nathan N. O’Hara

Validating a transnational fracture treatment registry using a standardized method

Subsequent to a three-month pilot phase, recruiting patients for the newly established BFCC (Baltic Fracture Competence Centre) transnational fracture registry, a validation of the data quality needed to be ca...

Authors: Jasper Frese, Annalice Gode, Gerhard Heinrichs, Armin Will and Arndt-Peter Schulz

Correction to: Methods for trustworthy nutritional recommendations NutriRECS (Nutritional Recommendations and accessible Evidence summaries Composed of Systematic reviews): a protocol

Following publication of the original article [1], the authors reported a change in the ‘Competing interests’ section as described below.

Authors: Bradley C. Johnston, Pablo Alonso-Coello, Malgorzata M. Bala, Dena Zeraatkar, Montserrat Rabassa, Claudia Valli, Catherine Marshall, Regina El Dib, Robin W. M. Vernooij, Per O. Vandvik and Gordon H. Guyatt

Simulation and minimization: technical advances for factorial experiments designed to optimize clinical interventions

The Multiphase Optimization Strategy (MOST) is designed to maximize the impact of clinical healthcare interventions, which are typically multicomponent and increasingly complex. MOST often relies on factorial ...

Authors: Jocelyn Kuhn, Radley Christopher Sheldrick, Sarabeth Broder-Fingert, Andrea Chu, Lisa Fortuna, Megan Jordan, Dana Rubin and Emily Feinberg

Self-reported data in environmental health studies: mail vs. web-based surveys

Internet has been broadly employed as a facilitator for epidemiological surveys, as a way to provide a more economical and practical alternative to traditional survey modes. A current trend in survey research ...

Authors: Manuella Lech Cantuaria and Victoria Blanes-Vidal

Challenges of one-year longitudinal follow-up of a prospective, observational cohort study using an anonymised database: recommendations for trainee research collaboratives

Trainee research collaboratives (TRCs) have pioneered high quality, prospective ‘snap-shot’ surgical cohort studies in the UK. Outcomes After Kidney injury in Surgery (OAKS) was the first TRC cohort study to a...

Authors: Dmitri Nepogodiev

Strategies for recruitment in general practice settings: the iSOLVE fall prevention pragmatic cluster randomised controlled trial

Falls are common among older people, and General Practitioners (GPs) could play an important role in implementing strategies to manage fall risk. Despite this, fall prevention is not a routine activity in gene...

Authors: Amy C. W. Tan, Lindy Clemson, Lynette Mackenzie, Catherine Sherrington, Chris Roberts, Anne Tiedemann, Constance D. Pond, Fiona White and Judy M. Simpson

Consent to data linkage in a large online epidemiological survey of 18–23 year old Australian women in 2012–13

Consent to link survey data with health-related administrative datasets is increasingly being sought but little is known about the influence of recruiting via online technologies on participants’ consents. The...

Authors: Anna Graves, Deirdre McLaughlin, Janni Leung and Jennifer Powers

Recommendations to conduct and report systematic reviews in medical literature: a scoping review

This scoping review aims to identify, review and characterize the published recommendations to conduct and/or to report a systematic review in medical interventions area.

Authors: Ana Penedones, Carlos Alves and Francisco Batel-Marques

DEBATE-statistical analysis plans for observational studies

All clinical research benefits from transparency and validity. Transparency and validity of studies may increase by prospective registration of protocols and by publication of statistical analysis plans (SAPs)...

Authors: Bart Hiemstra, Frederik Keus, Jørn Wetterslev, Christian Gluud and Iwan C. C. van der Horst

Robustness of the Tariff method for diagnosing verbal autopsies: impact of additional site data on the relationship between symptom and cause

Verbal autopsy (VA) is increasingly being considered as a cost-effective method to improve cause of death information in countries with low quality vital registration. VA algorithms that use empirical data hav...

Authors: Hafizur Rahman Chowdhury, Abraham D. Flaxman, Jonathan C. Joseph, Riley H. Hazard, Nurul Alam, Ian Douglas Riley and Alan D. Lopez

Heckman-type selection models to obtain unbiased estimates with missing measures outcome: theoretical considerations and an application to missing birth weight data

In low-income settings, key outcomes such as biomarkers or clinical assessments are often missing for a substantial proportion of the study population. The aim of this study was to assess the extent to which H...

Authors: Siaka Koné, Bassirou Bonfoh, Daouda Dao, Inza Koné and Günther Fink

Effectiveness of incentives and follow-up on increasing survey response rates and participation in field studies

Questionnaires are valuable data collection instruments in public health research, and can serve to pre-screen respondents for suitability in future studies. Survey non-response leads to reduced effective samp...

Authors: Michael G. Smith, Maryam Witte, Sarah Rocha and Mathias Basner

Value-based healthcare in ischemic stroke care: case-mix adjustment models for clinical and patient-reported outcomes

Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) have been proposed for benchmarking health care quality across hospitals, which requires extensive case-mix adjustment. The current study’s aim was to develop and comp...

Authors: Arvind Oemrawsingh, Nikki van Leeuwen, Esmee Venema, Martien Limburg, Frank-Erik de Leeuw, Markus P. Wijffels, Aafke J. de Groot, Pieter H. E. Hilkens, Jan A. Hazelzet, Diederik W. J. Dippel, Carla H. Bakker, Helene R. Voogdt-Pruis and Hester F. Lingsma

Privacy-protecting estimation of adjusted risk ratios using modified Poisson regression in multi-center studies

Multi-center studies can generate robust and generalizable evidence, but privacy considerations and legal restrictions often make it challenging or impossible to pool individual-level data across data-contribu...

Authors: Di Shu, Jessica G. Young and Sengwee Toh

Development of a healthy ageing index in Latin American countries - a 10/66 dementia research group population-based study

Our population is ageing and in 2050 more than one out of five people will be 60 years or older; 80% of whom will be living in a low-and-middle income country. Living longer does not entail living healthier; h...

Authors: Christina Daskalopoulou, Kia-Chong Chua, Artemis Koukounari, Francisco Félix Caballero, Martin Prince and A. Matthew Prina

Healthy ageing and the prediction of mortality and incidence dependence in low- and middle- income countries: a 10/66 population-based cohort study

In the absence of a consensus on definition and measurement of healthy ageing, we created a healthy ageing index tallying with the functional ability framework provided by the World Health Organization. To cre...

Authors: Christina Daskalopoulou, Martin Prince, Artemis Koukounari, Josep Maria Haro, Demosthenes B. Panagiotakos and A. Matthew Prina