Suny Downstate; Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis

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• Format Texts
• Language/s English
• Target Audience Further education
• EBM Stage 3 - Appraising evidence
• Duration <5 mins
• Difficulty Introductory

Key Concepts addressed

• 2-2a Reviews of fair comparisons should be systematic
• 2-3b Relative measures of effects can be misleading

Details

Important medical questions are typically studied more than once, often by different research teams in different locations.

A systematic review is a comprehensive survey of a topic in which all of the primary studies of the highest level of evidence have been systematically identified, appraised and then summarized according to an explicit and reproducible methodology.

A meta-analysis is a survey in which the results of all of the included studies are similar enough statistically that the results are combined and analyzed as if they were one study. In general a good systematic review or meta-analysis will be a better guide to practice than an individual article.

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Suny Downstate Medical Center, EBM Resources.