Risk of bias assessments for blinding of participants and personnel in Cochrane reviews were frequently inadequate

Ref ID 344
First Author O. Barcot
Journal JOURNAL OF CLINICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY
Year Of Publishing 2019
URL https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(19)30275-6/fulltext
Keywords • General medical
• Risk of bias
• Cochrane
Problem(s) • Flawed risk of bias undertaken
• Weaknesses identified in some Cochrane reviews
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country Croatia
Aim To assess adequacy of judgments about risk of bias for blinding of participants and personnel (performance bias) in Cochrane systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials published in the Cochrane Library from July 2015 to June 2016.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings Overall 26% of judgments for performance bias were not in line with the Cochrane Handbook and were therefore considered inadequate. In reviews where Cochrane authors have split the performance bias domain into two subdomains, based on blinded individuals, we found lower prevalence of inadequate risk of bias judgments, with 9% of judgments for blinding of participants, and 5.8% judgments for the blinding of personnel subdomain being judged inadequately.
Number of systematic reviews included 718
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 955
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description