Concerns about a systematic review of mediators of PTSD treatments: A commentary on Alpert and colleagues (2023)

Ref ID 1063
First Author J. Sonis
Journal CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW
Year Of Publishing 2023
URL https://www-sciencedirect-com.sheffield.idm.oclc.org/science/article/pii/S0272735823000818?via%3Dihub
Keywords • Mental health
• Missing data
Problem(s) • Errors in study inclusion or omission of relevant studies
• Ignores setting or context of included studies which limits review applicability
Article Type Editorial
Article Subtype Comment/letter
First Author Country United States
Aim To highlight some concerns in a systematic review of mediators of treatments for PTSD published in 2023.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings The letter's authors found the following concerns relating to the conduct of the systematic review. The authors did not: 1) include the causal mediation framework to help guide the methodological standards included in the review; 2) recognise the ramifications of the fact that many of the included studies used time, rather than treatment type, as the primary independent variable of interest; 3) include assessment of mediator-outcome confounding in their list of methodological standards. Another limitation was exclusive focus on statistical significance and a vote-counting approach for assessing mediators the PTSD research literature.
Number of systematic reviews included 1
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 1
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description