Showing papers in "Journal of Clinical Epidemiology in 2009"

TL;DR: This Explanation and Elaboration document explains the meaning and rationale for each checklist item and includes an example of good reporting and, where possible, references to relevant empirical studies and methodological literature.

TL;DR: AMSTAR has good agreement, reliability, construct validity, and feasibility, and these findings need confirmation by a broader range of assessors and a more diverse range of reviews.

TL;DR: A tool to assist trialists in making design decisions that are consistent with their trial's stated purpose is proposed, with 10 key domains and which identifies criteria to help researchers determine how pragmatic or explanatory their trial is.

TL;DR: This evidence-based guideline facilitates the improvement of search quality through peer review, and thus the improvement in quality of systematic reviews, and is relevant for librarians/information specialists, journal editors, developers of knowledge translation tools, research organizations, and funding bodies.

TL;DR: Clinicians are advised to base their decisions on studies that most closely match their own clinical situation, using prevalence to guide the detection of differences in study population or study design.

TL;DR: Most of the methods try to impute, adjust, or construct a reference standard in cases where an acceptable reference standard does not exist, and the concept of clinical test validation may provide an alternative paradigm to evaluate a diagnostic test.

TL;DR: Multiple-treatments meta-analysis methods allow for more detailed investigations than naïve methods in the analysis of indirect evidence on treatment effects and did not find clear evidence that any topical fluoride modality is more effective than any other.

TL;DR: There is an immediate need for methodological work in the area of prognosis systematic reviews because of methodological shortcomings in the primary and review literature, and there remains uncertainty about reliability of conclusions regarding prognostic factors for low back pain.

TL;DR: Together, quantile regression and RCS are a powerful combination for exploring relationships between continuous variables.

TL;DR: Two methods for estimating confidence intervals (CIs) around absolute and relative changes in outcomes calculated from segmented regression parameter estimates are described and illustrated.

TL;DR: The ACS diagnoses contained in hospital discharge registries should be used with caution and restricting analyses to patients with myocardial infarction and/or patients discharged from wards might be a useful alternative.

TL;DR: This article demonstrates how IV analysis arises from an analogous but potentially impossible RCT design, and outlines the assumptions necessary for valid estimation, and gives examples of instruments used in clinical epidemiology and concludes with an outline on estimation of effects.

TL;DR: The quality of systematic reviews in physiotherapy is improving, and the use of Cochrane Collaboration procedures appears to improve the methods and quality.

TL;DR: For some diagnostic groups, however, DCs are often inaccurate even when DC and HDC are compatible, and producers of mortality statistics could improve the accuracy of the statistics.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that these criticisms are inaccurate and miss the historical importance of his struggle to improve clinical medicine using population thinking and group comparison, which was a first step toward what we would call today an evidence-based medicine.

TL;DR: Investigators are strongly recommend to present the SEM and MIC of PROs and use these to estimate sample sizes for research and to determine the usefulness of these outcomes in daily clinical practice.

TL;DR: A cross-sectional survey of 352 HMO members aged 65 years or more with, at a minimum, diabetes, depression, and osteoarthritis suggests that self-reported descriptions of multimorbidity incorporate biopsychosocial constructs that reflect the perceived burden of multimOrbidity.

TL;DR: This complex intervention developed and evaluated a complex intervention to increase levels of randomization and informed consent in a difficult trial and could be applied to other trials to maximizerandomization andinformed consent, and allow the mounting of trials previously considered too difficult.

TL;DR: Bayesian and frequentist analyses complement each other when interpreting the results of randomized trials, and future reports of randomized Trials should include both.

TL;DR: The quality of reporting of RCT abstracts published in main general medical journals is suboptimal, with the recent recommendations from the CONSORT for Abstracts expected that the transparency of abstract reporting can and should improve.

TL;DR: Ordinal logistic regression successfully detects DIF for HRQoL instruments with short scales, and the impact of the number of items in the scale was relatively small.

TL;DR: Although there are some computational difficulties, longitudinal tobit analysis provides a very nice solution for the longitudinal analysis of outcome variables with floor or ceiling effects.

TL;DR: In the study setting, most of the 25 formulations of the PPP IV were strong IVs and resulted in a strong reduction of imbalance in many variations, and the association between strength and imbalance was mixed.

TL;DR: EPCs should grade strength of evidence separately for each major outcome and, for comparative effectiveness reviews, all major comparisons.

TL;DR: The LEFS has good measurement properties--namely test-retest reliability and cross-sectional construct validity--and it could be an alternative to WOMAC-PF, which showed similar levels of convergent validity.

TL;DR: In the case of RFCA for AF, the case series make a useful contribution to the systematic review and can increase the evidence base and strengthen the credibility of a review of an emerging health technology.

TL;DR: The STREGA recommendations do not prescribe or dictate how a genetic association study should be designed, but seek to enhance the transparency of its reporting, regardless of choices made during design, conduct, or analysis.

TL;DR: Using the entire cohort, rather than just those with ratings adjacent to the dichotomization point, yielded more precise and sensible MID estimates, with one exception, high precision was obtained when using the ROC curve method for any cutoff on the rating scale.