Too many systematic reviews?

Press release from PLoS Medicine

2010-09-22

(Press-News.org) There are now 75 clinical trials and 11 systematic reviews of trials published every day, with no signs this pace is slowing. How will we ever cope?, ask Hilda Bastian, Paul Glasziou, and Sir Iain Chalmers in this week's PLoS Medicine, who also decry the continued poor quality of many of these studies.

Analysing the history and growth of reviews of evidence, the authors recommend that we must now reduce unnecessary trials and prioritise truly systematic review of the literature, so that the needs of patients, clinicians, and policymakers are met. "Streamlining and innovation in methods of systematic reviewing are necessary to enable valid answers to be found for most patient questions," argue the authors, and "clinicians and patients require open access to these important resources."

INFORMATION: Funding:No specific funding was received for this piece.

Competing Interests: HB works for a health technology assessment agency.

Citation: Bastian H, Glasziou P, Chalmers I (2010) Seventy-Five Trials and Eleven Systematic Reviews a Day: How Will We Ever Keep Up? PLoS Med 7(9): e1000326. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000326

IN YOUR COVERAGE PLEASE USE THIS URL TO PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE FREELY AVAILABLE PAPER: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000326

PRESS-ONLY PREVIEW OF THE ARTICLE: www.plos.org/press/plme-07-09-bastian.pdf

CONTACT:

Hilda Bastian
IQWiG
Health Information
Dillenburger Str 27
Cologne, NRW 51105
Germany
49 221 35685401
hilda.bastian@iqwig.de
www.iqwig.de

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Asian efforts in AIDS vaccine development step up

2010-09-22

Regional efforts towards an AIDS vaccine must be strengthened and harmonized, says a new article in this week's PLoS Medicine Magazine. Yiming Shao from the National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention in Beijing, China and colleagues from a range of Asian and international agencies announce the formation of AVAN—the AIDS Vaccine for Asia Network—that aims to strengthen its regional efforts in finding an AIDS vaccine. The authors say that AVAN has been set up to help facilitate the development of a regional AIDS vaccine strategy that will: accelerate research ...

Self-management counseling for patients with heart failure does not improve outcomes

2010-09-22

Patients with mild to moderate heart failure who received educational materials and self-management counseling in an attempt to improve adherence to medical advice did not have a reduced rate of death or hospitalization compared to patients who received educational materials alone, according to a study in the September 22/29 issue of JAMA. There have been advances in the development of effective therapies for heart failure, but challenges remain in the delivery of these therapies to patients. "Patient nonadherence to heart failure drugs ranges from 30 percent to 60 percent ...

Shorter biological marker length in aplastic anemia patients linked to higher relapse, death rates

2010-09-22

Among patients receiving immunosuppressive therapy for severe aplastic anemia (a condition in which the bone marrow is unable to produce blood cells), the length of telomeres (chromosome markers of biological aging) was not related to the response to treatment but was associated with a higher rate of relapse (return to low blood cell counts) and lower overall survival, according to a study in the September 22/29 issue of JAMA. Severe aplastic anemia is characterized by life-threatening cytopenias (blood cell count below normal), but this condition can be treated by bone ...

Risk of infection after ultrasound-guided procedures is low, study suggests

2010-09-22

The incidence of serious infection after common ultrasound-guided procedures, such as biopsy, fine-needle aspiration (a form of biopsy) and thoracentesis (procedure involving needle drainage of the chest cavity) is low, according to a study in the October issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology (www.ajronline.org). Ultrasound imaging, also called ultrasound scanning or sonography, involves exposing part of the body to high-frequency sound waves to produce pictures of the inside of the body. "Ultrasound-guided procedures are safe, effective and accurate in that ...

Adverse cardiac events are rare after a negative cardiac CTA exam, study suggests

2010-09-22

Adverse cardiac events are rare one year after patients are admitted to the emergency room with low-to-moderate risk chest pain and are discharged due to a negative cardiac computed tomography angiogram (CTA), according to a study in the October issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology (www.ajronline.org). Cardiac CTA is a noninvasive heart-imaging test that determines whether fatty deposits or calcium deposits have built up in the coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart muscle. Earlier discharge of patients with low-to-moderate risk chest pain after ...

Rethinking how hospitals react when a patient's health deteriorates

2010-09-22

The growing use of rapid response teams dispatched by hospitals to evaluate patients whose conditions have suddenly deteriorated may be masking systemic problems in how hospitals care for their sickest patients, says a prominent Johns Hopkins patient safety expert. In a commentary published in the Sept. 22 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Peter Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and co-author Eugene Litvak, Ph.D., president of the Institute for Healthcare ...

Ecologists find new clues on climate change in 150-year-old pressed plants

2010-09-22

Plants picked up to 150 years ago by Victorian collectors and held by the million in herbarium collections across the world could become a powerful – and much needed – new source of data for studying climate change, according to research published this week in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Ecology. The scarcity of reliable long-term data on phenology – the study of natural climate-driven events such as the timing of trees coming into leaf or plants flowering each spring – has hindered scientists' understanding of how species respond to climate change. But ...

Ultrashort laser ablation enables novel metal films

2010-09-22

Washington, D.C. (September 21, 2010) -- Laser ablation is well known in medical applications like dermatology and dentistry, and for more than a decade it has been used to vaporize materials that are difficult to evaporate for high-tech applications like deposition of superconductors. Now researchers in the Journal of Applied Physics, which is published by the American Institute of Physics have studied the properties of femtosecond laser ablation plumes to better understand how to apply them to specialized films. Salvatore Amoruso at University of Naples, Italy and ...

Certain doped-oxide ceramics resist Ohm's Law

2010-09-22

Washington, D.C. (September 21, 2010) -- For months, Anthony West could hardly believe what he and his colleagues were seeing in the lab -- or the only explanation for the unexpected phenomena that seemed to make sense. Several of the slightly doped high-purity barium titanate (BT) ceramics his research group was investigating were not following the venerable Ohm's Law, which relates electrical voltage to current and resistance. Applying or removing a voltage caused a gradual change in the materials' electrical resistance. The new effect was seen consistently regardless ...

Progress toward terabit-rate high-density recording

2010-09-22

Washington, D.C. (September 21, 2010) -- Research is closing in on the next-generation of ultra-high-density magneto-optical storage devices that could store more than 6,000 Terabits (6 petabits) of data, more than 70 times the contents of the entire U.S. Library of Congress, on a single 5-inch disc. Yet the vast storage amount is limited by the ability to write data quickly enough to the device. In the Journal of Applied Physics, researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University in China have demonstrated a way to record on ferromagnetic films using a laser-assisted ultrafast magnetization ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

New antibody-drug conjugate shows promising efficacy in EGFR-mutated NSCLC patients

Iza-Bren in combination with osimertinib shows 100% response rate in EGFR-mutated NSCLC, phase II study finds

COMPEL study shows continuing osimertinib treatment through progression with the addition of chemotherapy improves progression-free survival in EGFR-mutated NSCLC