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Skeletal related events (SREs) are common in men with metastatic prostate cancer (mPC). Various methods have been used to identify SREs from claims data. The objective of this study was to provide a framework ...
Age-standardized net survival provides an important population-based summary of cancer survival that appropriately accounts for differences in other-cause mortality rates and standardizes the population age di...
Systematic reviews are pivotal components in the development of evidence-based clinical guidelines. To evaluate the methodological quality of these systematic reviews, several tools have been proposed. Among t...
Proxy responses are very common when surveys are conducted among the elderly or disabled population. Outcomes reported by proxy may be systematically different from those obtained from patients directly. The o...
When conducting a meta-analysis of a continuous outcome, estimated means and standard deviations from the selected studies are required in order to obtain an overall estimate of the mean effect and its confide...
The Godin-Shephard Leisure-Time Physical Activity Questionnaire (GSLTPAQ) is one of the most often used questionnaires in oncology research, yet modifications to the scale are done with little evidence of psyc...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Medical Research Methodology 2016 16:30
Clustered data with binary outcomes are often analysed using random intercepts models or generalised estimating equations (GEE) resulting in cluster-specific or ‘population-average’ inference, respectively.
Network meta-analysis is used to compare three or more treatments for the same condition. Within a Bayesian framework, for each treatment the probability of being best, or, more general, the probability that i...
A major challenge in updating clinical guidelines is to efficiently identify new, relevant evidence. We evaluated the efficiency and feasibility of two new approaches: the development of restrictive search str...
An increasing number of research designs are using text messaging (SMS) as a means of self-reported symptom and outcome monitoring in a variety of long-term health conditions, including severity ratings of dep...
Multi-item questionnaires are important instruments for monitoring health in epidemiological longitudinal studies. Mostly sum-scores are used as a summary measure for these multi-item questionnaires. The objec...
Estimations of survival rates are diverse and the choice of the appropriate method depends on the context. Given the increasing interest in multiple imputation methods, we explored the interest of a multiple i...
Propensity score methods have become a popular tool for reducing selection bias in making causal inference from observational studies in medical research. Propensity score matching, a key component of propensi...
Attrition is an important problem in cohort studies. Tracing cohort members who have moved or otherwise lost contact with the study is vital. There is some debate about the acceptability and relative effective...
The purpose of this note is to contribute some general points on a recent paper by Ledberg and Wennberg (BMC Med Res Meth 14:58, 2014) which need to be rectified. They advocate the capture-removal estimator. F...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Medical Research Methodology 2015 15:76
The results of multivariable regression models are usually summarized in the form of parameter estimates for the covariates, goodness-of-fit statistics, and the relevant p-values. These statistics do not infor...
A frequently used statistic for testing homogeneity in a meta-analysis of K independent studies is Cochran’s Q. For a standard test of homogeneity the Q statistic is referred to a chi-square distribution with K−1...
Simon’s two-stage designs are popular choices for conducting phase II clinical trials, especially in the oncology trials to reduce the number of patients placed on ineffective experimental therapies. Recently ...
Multiple interventions meta-analysis has been recommended in the methodological literature as a tool for evidence synthesis when a heterogeneous set of interventions is included in the same review—and, more re...
Record linkage of existing individual health care data is an efficient way to answer important epidemiological research questions. Reuse of individual health-related data faces several problems: Either a uniqu...
Comparing the relative utility of diagnostic tests is challenging when available datasets are small, partial or incomplete. The analytical leverage associated with a large sample size can be gained by integrat...
With the increase of clinical trial costs during the last decades, the design of feasibility studies has become an essential process to reduce avoidable and costly protocol amendments. This design includes tim...
In early diagnostic trials, particularly in biomarker studies, the aim is often to select diagnostic tests among several methods. In case of metric, discrete, or even ordered categorical data, the area under t...
When summary results from studies of counts of events in time contain zeros, the study-specific incidence rate ratio (IRR) and its standard error cannot be calculated because the log of zero is undefined. This...
Informed consent is the foundation of the ethical conduct of health research. Obtaining informed consent may unwittingly interfere with the data collected in research studies, particularly if they concern sens...
Dichotomisation of continuous outcomes has been rightly criticised by statisticians because of the loss of information incurred. However to communicate a comparison of risks, dichotomised outcomes may be neces...
Cancer incidence and prevalence estimates are necessary to inform health policy, to predict public health impact and to identify etiological factors. Registers have been used to estimate the number of cancer c...
Small number of clusters and large variation of cluster sizes commonly exist in cluster-randomized trials (CRTs) and are often the critical factors affecting the validity and efficiency of statistical analyses. F
In many medical studies the likelihood ratio test (LRT) has been widely applied to examine whether the random effects variance component is zero within the mixed effects models framework; whereas little work a...
The editors of BMC Medical Research Methodology would like to thank all our reviewers who have contributed to the journal in Volume 14 (2014).
Estimated effects vary across studies, partly because of random sampling error and partly because of heterogeneity. In meta-analysis, the fraction of variance that is due to heterogeneity is estimated by the s...
Network meta-analysis (NMA) is a methodology for indirectly comparing, and strengthening direct comparisons of two or more treatments for the management of disease by combining evidence from multiple studies. ...
Accurate blood pressure measurements are needed in clinical practice, intervention studies and health examination surveys. Blood pressure measurements are sensitive: their accuracy can be affected by measureme...
Survey research in healthcare is an important tool to collect information about healthcare delivery, service use and overall issues relating to quality of care. Unfortunately, physicians are often a group with...
In resource-limited settings, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of antiretroviral treatment (ART) programs often relies on aggregated facility-level data. Such data are limited, however, because of the potential...
Missing data are common in medical research, which can lead to a loss in statistical power and potentially biased results if not handled appropriately. Multiple imputation (MI) is a statistical method, widely ...
Low participation rates reduce effective sample size, statistical power and can increase risk for selection bias. Previous research suggests that offering choice of participation mode can improve participation...
Sample size calculations should correspond to the intended method of analysis. Nevertheless, for non-normal distributions, they are often done on the basis of normal approximations, even when the data are to b...
Cancer relapses may be useful to predict the risk of death. To take into account relapse information, the Landmark approach is popular. As an alternative, we propose the joint frailty model for a recurrent eve...
The COMET (Core Outcome Measures in Effectiveness Trials) Initiative is developing a publicly accessible online resource to collate the knowledge base for core outcome set development (COS) and the applied wor...
Exploring causal associations in HIV research requires careful consideration of numerous epidemiologic limitations. First, a primary cause of HIV, unprotected anal intercourse (UAI), is time-varying and, if it...
Cut-point finding is a crucial step for clinical decision making when dealing with diagnostic (or prognostic) biomarkers. The extension of ROC-based cut-point finding methods to the case of censored failure ti...
Large registries are important data sources in epidemiological studies of shock, if these registries are valid. Therefore, we examined the positive predictive value (PPV) of diagnosis codes for shock, the proc...
Pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI) constitutes a significant burden and diagnostic challenge in the emergency department (ED). While large North American research networks have derived clinical prediction ...
Patient-reported outcomes (PRO) are important as endpoints in clinical trials and epidemiological studies. Guidelines for the development of PRO instruments and analysis of PRO data have emphasized the need to...
Patient and public involvement (PPI) is central to research and service planning. Identifying effective, meaningful ways of involvement is challenging. The cohort study ‘Do specialist services for teenagers and y...
Discrete Choice Experiments (DCEs) are increasingly used in studies in healthcare research but there is still little empirical evidence for the predictive value of these hypothetical situations in similar real...
Primary-care based randomized controlled trials (RCTs) build an important evidence base for general practice but little evidence exists about barriers to recruitment which often hamper such trials.
Epidemiological studies about cardiovascular diseases often rely on methods based on time-to-first-event for data analysis. Without taking into account multiple event-types and the recurrency of a specific car...
In the present state of knowledge regarding the etiology of dental caries, it is unacceptable for studies addressing factors associated with this outcome to disregard oral hygiene. Simple, valid methods are ne...
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