Opioid prescribing for acute postoperative pain: an overview of systematic reviews related to two consensus statements relevant at patient, prescriber, system and public health levels

Ref ID 1040
First Author C.L. McCorquodale
Journal BMC ANESTHESIOLOGY
Year Of Publishing 2023
URL https://bmcanesthesiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12871-023-02243-5
Keywords • Pain
• Pharmacological
• Low methodological quality
Problem(s) • Meta-analyses and forest plots presented without considering risk of bias / quality
• Lack of statistical expertise in handling of quantitative data
• Reasons for excluding potentially eligible studies not provided
• Conflicts of interest or funding of included studies not assessed
• Low methodological (AMSTAR) quality
• No registered or published protocol
Number of systematic reviews included 12
Summary of Findings Of the 12 included SRs on acute postoperative pain control indexed across PubMed/MEDLINE and Cochrane up to November 2022 seven were critically low quality (AMSTAR 2), two were low, one was high and two could not be fully appraised. Only 4 reviews (33.3%) reported a protocol, and only 2 (16.6%) provided a list of excluded studies with justifications or reported the sources of funding of included studies. Over half (7/12, 58.3%) did not use appropriate methods for statistical combination of results nor assessed the potential impact of RoB in individual studies on the results of the meta-analysis. The supplementary material of 2 could not be accessed and therefore the AMSTAR 2 assessments could not be fully completed.
Did the article find that the problem(s) led to qualitative changes in interpretation of the results? N/A
Are the methods of the article described in enough detail to replicate the study?