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Clinical and public health guidelines include a variety of types of normative statements concerning interventions. “Recommendations” are usually the central focus, and are based on one or more systematic reviews of research evidence. Guidelines may include other types of normative statements, however, including GRADE good (or best) practice statements (GPS), which represent recommendations that guideline panels feel are important but are not appropriate for formal ratings of quality of evidence because it is sufficiently obvious that desirable effects outweigh undesirable effects ..read more

To review the findings of studies that have evaluated the design and/or usability of key risk of bias (RoB) tools for the assessment of RoB in primary studies, as categorised by the LATITUDES Network (a searchable library of RoB tools for evidence synthesis): PROBAST, RoB2, ROBINS-I, QUADAS-2, QUADAS-C, QUAPAS, ROBINS-E, and the COSMIN RoB checklist ..read more

To reduce health inequities it is important to identify intersections in characteristics of individuals subject to privilege or disadvantage. Different proposals for that have recently been published. One approach (1) considers models specified with 1st and all 2nd-order effects and another (2) the stratification based on multiple covariates; both categorize continuous covariates. A simulation study was conducted in order to review both methods with regard to identification of intersections showing true differences, rate of false positive results, and generalizability to independent data compa ..read more

Research integrity is guided by a set of principles to ensure research reliability, and rigor. It serves as a pillar to uphold society’s trust in science and foster scientific progress. However, over the past two decades, a surge in research integrity concerns, including fraudulent research, reproducibility challenges, and questionable practices, has raised critical questions about the reliability of scientific outputs, particularly in biomedical research. In the biomedical sciences, any breaches in research integrity could potentially lead to a domino effect impacting patient care, medical in ..read more

One study published in this month's issue of the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology and found in our special series on COVID-19 looked at externally validating six prognostic models for predicting mortality in population cohorts of older adults with COVID [1]. Zahra et al. [1] selected six models after assessing all COVID prognostic models for mortality to identify those with a low or uncertain risk of bias using the Prediction model Risk Of Bias ASsessment Tool (or PROBAST) [2]. The PROBAST assesses the applicability and risk of bias of studies that conduct diagnostic and prognostic predic ..read more

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Actively addressing issues of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in healthcare guidelines provides an important avenue ensure that individuals and communities receive high-quality health care that meets their needs. In 2020, the National Clinical Evidence Taskforce was charged with developing Australian living guidelines for COVID-19 (the Guidelines). It was intended that the Guidelines would consider the biological and social determinants of health underpinning evidence-based recommendations for of the treatment of COVID-19 ..read more

To develop a framework to identify and evaluate spin practices and its facilitators in studies on clinical prediction model, regardless of the modelling technique ..read more

To identify the patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) used in clinical trials assessing interventions for chronic pain, describe their psychometric properties and the clinical domains they cover ..read more