Osteopathic Medicine: Systematic Reviews

The revised edition of the Handbook offers the only guide on how to conduct, report and maintain a Cochrane Review 
 The second edition of The Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions contains essential guidance for preparing and maintaining Cochrane Reviews of the effects of health interventions. Designed to be an accessible resource, the Handbook will also be of interest to anyone undertaking systematic reviews of interventions outside Cochrane, and many of the principles and methods presented are appropriate for systematic reviews addressing research questions other than effects of interventions. This fully updated edition contains extensive new material on systematic review methods addressing a wide-range of topics including network meta-analysis, equity, complex interventions, narrative synthesis, and automation. Also new to this edition, integrated throughout the Handbook, is the set of standards Cochrane expects its reviews to meet.  Written for review authors, editors, trainers and others with an interest in Cochrane Reviews, the second edition of The Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions continues to offer an invaluable resource for understanding the role of systematic reviews, critically appraising health research studies and conducting reviews. 

Healthcare decision makers in search of reliable information that compares health interventions increasingly turn to systematic reviews for the best summary of the evidence. Systematic reviews identify, select, assess, and synthesize the findings of similar but separate studies, and can help clarify what is known and not known about the potential benefits and harms of drugs, devices, and other healthcare services. Systematic reviews can be helpful for clinicians who want to integrate research findings into their daily practices, for patients to make well-informed choices about their own care, for professional medical societies and other organizations that develop clinical practice guidelines. Too often systematic reviews are of uncertain or poor quality. There are no universally accepted standards for developing systematic reviews leading to variability in how conflicts of interest and biases are handled, how evidence is appraised, and the overall scientific rigor of the process. In Finding What Works in Health Care the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommends 21 standards for developing high-quality systematic reviews of comparative effectiveness research. The standards address the entire systematic review process from the initial steps of formulating the topic and building the review team to producing a detailed final report that synthesizes what the evidence shows and where knowledge gaps remain. Finding What Works in Health Care also proposes a framework for improving the quality of the science underpinning systematic reviews. This book will serve as a vital resource for both sponsors and producers of systematic reviews of comparative effectiveness research.

The systematic review is a rigorous method of collating and synthesizing evidence from multiple studies, producing a whole greater than the sum of parts. This textbook is an authoritative and accessible guide to an activity that is often found overwhelming. The authors steer readers on a logical, sequential path through the process, taking account of the different needs of researchers, students and practitioners. Practical guidance is provided on the fundamentals of systematic reviewing and also on advanced techniques such as meta-analysis. Examples are given in each chapter, with a succinct glossary to support the text. This up-to-date, accessible textbook will satisfy the needs of students, practitioners and educators in the sphere of healthcare, and contribute to improving the quality of evidence-based practice. The authors will advise some freely available or inexpensive open source/access resources (such as PubMed, R and Zotero) to help students how to perform a systemic review, in particular those with limited resources.

The past two decades have seen increasing interest and developments in methods for doing high quality systematic reviews. This volume provides a clear introduction to the concepts of systematic reviews, and lucidly describes the difficulties and traps to avoid. A unique feature of the manual is its description of the different methods needed for different types of health care questions: frequency of disease, prognosis, diagnosis, risk, and management. This book also provides illustrative examples and exercises for each of the sections.

The second edition of this best-selling book has been thoroughly revised and expanded to reflect the significant changes and advances made in systematic reviewing. New features include discussion on the rationale, meta-analyses of prognostic and diagnostic studies and software, and the use of systematic reviews in practice.

Systematic Reviews in Health Research Explore the cutting-edge of systematic reviews in healthcare In this Third Edition of the classic Systematic Reviews textbook, now titled Systematic Reviews in Health Research, a team of distinguished researchers deliver a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the rapidly evolving area of systematic reviews and meta-analysis. The book demonstrates why systematic reviews--when conducted properly--provide the highest quality evidence on clinical and public health interventions and shows how they contribute to inference in many other contexts. The new edition reflects the broad role of systematic reviews, including: Twelve new chapters, covering additional study designs, methods and software, for example, on genetic association studies, prediction models, prevalence studies, network and dose-response meta-analysis Thorough update of 15 chapters focusing on systematic reviews of interventions Access to a companion website offering supplementary materials and practical exercises (www.systematic-reviews3.org) A key text for health researchers, Systematic Reviews in Health Research is also an indispensable resource for practitioners, students, and instructors in the health sciences needing to understand research synthesis.

This book shows readers how to use scientific methods to identify, select, assess, and summarize the findings of studies in order to answer health care questions.