Cochrane Collaboration

About: Cochrane Collaboration is a nonprofit organization based out in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Systematic review & Randomized controlled trial. The organization has 1995 authors who have published 3928 publications receiving 382695 citations.

Combined modality treatment improves tumor control and overall survival in patients with early stage Hodgkin’s lymphoma: a systematic review

Abstract: Combined modality treatment (CMT) of chemotherapy followed by localized radiotherapy is standard treatment for patients with early stage Hodgkin's lymphoma. However, the role of radiotherapy has been questioned recently and some clinical study groups advocate chemotherapy only for this indication. We thus performed a systematic review with meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials comparing chemotherapy alone with CMT in patients with early stage Hodgkin's lymphoma with respect to response rate, tumor control and overall survival (OS). We searched Medline, EMBASE and the Cochrane Library as well as conference proceedings from January 1980 to February 2009 for randomized controlled trials comparing chemotherapy alone versus the same chemotherapy regimen plus radiotherapy. Progression free survival and similar outcomes were analyzed together as tumor control. Effect measures used were hazard ratios for OS and tumor control as well as relative risks for complete response (CR). Meta-analyses were performed using RevMan5. Five randomized controlled trials involving 1,245 patients were included. The hazard ratio (HR) was 0.41 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.25 to 0.66) for tumor control and 0.40 (95% CI 0.27 to 0.59) for OS for patients receiving CMT compared to chemotherapy alone. CR rates were similar between treatment groups. In sensitivity analyses another 6 trials were included that did not fulfill the inclusion criteria of our protocol but were considered relevant to the topic. These trials underlined the results of the main analysis. In conclusion, adding radiotherapy to chemotherapy improves tumor control and OS in patients with early stage Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Making evidence based medicine work for individual patients

Abstract: Margaret McCartney and colleagues argue that new models of evidence synthesis and shared decision making are needed to accelerate a move from guideline driven care to individualised care

Searching the right database. A comparison of four databases for psychiatry journals

Abstract: Journal coverage is one factor that affects the retrieval of relevant information from bibliographic databases. The aims of this study were to investigate the coverage of databases for psychiatry journals, and to assess the overlap between databases. Psychiatry journals were identified using Ulrich’s International Periodicals Directory and then analysed to see which bibliographic databases indexed the most journals. A total of 213 abstracting and indexing services were listed as indexing at least one of the 977 psychiatry journals identified. The four most frequently cited databases (PsycLIT, EMBASE, BIOSIS and MEDLINE) indexed 506 (52%) of the psychiatry journals. Of these 506 journals, PsycLIT indexed 367 (73%), EMBASE 337 (67%), BIOSIS 243 (48%) and MEDLINE 236 (47%). Combining the databases with the highest yields (PsycLIT and EMBASE) increased the number of journals indexed to 461 (91%). The four databases combined accounted for 90% of all psychiatry journals found to be indexed by at least one abstracting and indexing service. More than 400 journals were not indexed at all. Variations in the overlap between PsycLIT, EMBASE, BIOSIS and MEDLINE, and the high proportion (35%) of journals indexed in only one of these four databases emphasize the importance of searching more than one or even two databases to ensure optimal coverage of the literature.