A systematic review finds that diagnostic reviews fail to incorporate quality despite available tools

Ref ID 403
First Author P. Whiting
Journal JOURNAL OF CLINICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY
Year Of Publishing 2005
URL https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(04)00165-9/fulltext
Keywords • Diagnostic
• Risk of bias
Problem(s) • No quality assessment undertaken or reported
• Limited quality assessment or no risk of bias
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country United Kingdom
Aim To assess the practice of quality assessment of primary studies used in systematic reviews of diagnostic studies retrieved indexed in the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects between 1995–2001.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings 49% of included reviews had not conducted any form of explicit quality assessment of the individual studies. None of the reviews had used the quality assessment to weight primary study results in the meta-analysis.
Number of systematic reviews included 114
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 114
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description