How quickly do systematic reviews go out of date? A survival analysis

Ref ID 155
First Author K. G. Shojania
Journal ANNALS OF INTERNAL MEDICINE
Year Of Publishing 2007
URL https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17638714/
Keywords • General medical
• Currency
Problem(s) • Untimely (taking too long) or resource intensive
• Not updated regularly
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country Canada
Aim To estimate the average time to changes in evidence that are sufficiently important to warrant updating systematic reviews by performing a survival analysis of 100 systematic reviews
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings Survival analysis of 100 meta-analyses indexed in American College of Physicians Journal Club from 1995 to 2005 found that new evidence that substantively changed conclusions about the effectiveness or harms of therapies arose frequently and within relatively short time periods. The median survival time without substantive new evidence for the meta-analyses was 5.5 years. Significant new evidence was already available for 7% of the reviews at the time of publication and became available for 23% within 2 years.
Number of systematic reviews included 100
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 651
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description