The Role of Complementary and Alternative Medicine on Cancer-Related Fatigue in Adults: An Overview of Systematic Reviews

Ref ID 1035
First Author P. Li
Journal INTEGRATIVE CANCER THERAPIES
Year Of Publishing 2023
URL https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15347354231188947?rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed&url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org
Keywords • Oncology
• Complimentary & Alternative
• Risk of bias
• Low methodological quality
• Low reporting quality
• Certainty
Problem(s) • Meta-analyses and forest plots presented without considering risk of bias / quality
• Reasons for excluding potentially eligible studies not provided
• Conflicts of interest or funding of included studies not assessed
• Low reporting (PRISMA) quality
• Low methodological (AMSTAR) quality
• High risk of bias (ROBIS)
• Interpreted without considering certainty or overall quality of the evidence base
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country China
Checklists • PRISMA 2020
• AMSTAR 2
• ROBIS
• GRADE
Aim To assess the quality of systematic reviews (SRs) indexed across China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wan Fang database, Chinese biomedical literature service system (SinoMed), Chongqing VIP Database, MEDLINE (via PubMed), Web of Science, CINAHL, Scopus, OVID (including PsycInfo), Embase, PEDro, Cochrane Library, and PROSPERO from inception to September 2022, for CRF.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings From 30 included systematic reviews (SRs) indexed across China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wan Fang database, Chinese biomedical literature service system (SinoMed), Chongqing VIP Database, MEDLINE (via PubMed), Web of Science, CINAHL, Scopus, OVID (including PsycInfo), Embase, PEDro, Cochrane Library, and PROSPERO from inception to September 2022. Of the 30 included SRs 29 (96.6%) SRs were rated as “critically low” quality, and one was rated as “low” quality based on AMSTAR 2 assessments. None of the reviews provided a list of excluded studies with justifications; only 1 (3.3%) review reported report on the sources of funding for the included studies or assessed the potential impact of RoB in individual studies on the results of the meta-analysis. The ROBIS evaluations showed that 11 (36.6%) SRs demonstrated a high risk of bias. According to the PRISMA checklist, no SRs reported all the items, and only 10 (33.3%) SRs sufficiently reported over 70%. The authors conducted a GRADE assessment to qualify each outcome with the certainty of evidence. Based on the GRADE system there were 51 pooled results of cancer related fatigue, of which 2 were assessed as “high” quality, 21 as “moderate” quality, 18 as “low” quality, and 10 as “very low” quality.
Number of systematic reviews included 30
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 6415
Treatment impacted Not Applicable
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted No
Interpretation impacted description