Ramadan intermittent fasting and its association with health-related indices and exercise test performance in athletes and physically active individuals: an overview of systematic reviews

Ref ID 1069
First Author K. Trabelsi
Journal BRITISH JOURNAL OF SPORTS MEDICINE
Year Of Publishing 2024
URL https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/58/3/136.long
Keywords • Nutrition
• General medical
• Low methodological quality
• Risk of bias
• Disclosure
• Protocols
Problem(s) • Lack of prespecification in eligibility criteria
• Reasons for excluding potentially eligible studies not provided
• Conflicts of interest or funding of included studies not assessed
• Risk of bias not incorporated into conclusions of review
• Low methodological (AMSTAR) quality
• No registered or published protocol
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country Tunisia
Checklists • AMSTAR 2
Aim To appraise methodological quality of published systematic reviews indexed across PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, SPORTDiscus, ProQuest, PsycINFO and SciELO, examining associations between Ramadan fasting observance (RO), health-related indices and exercise test performances.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings The methodological quality of the 14 included systematic reviews ranged from ‘low’ to ‘critically low’. None of the reviews provided a list of excluded studies, or disclosed sources of funding for the included studies. Ten reviews did not register their studies’ protocols in PROSPERO or other relevant databases (71.4%). Four reviews overlooked bias risk in primary studies when interpreting/discussing results (28.5%). Nine reviews inadequately explained the choice of study design (64.2%).
Number of systematic reviews included 14
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 60
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description