Conclusions in systematic reviews of mammography for breast cancer screening and associations with review design and author characteristics

Ref ID 535
First Author S. Raichand
Journal SYSTEMATIC REVIEWS
Year Of Publishing 2017
URL https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5441061/pdf/13643_2017_Article_495.pdf
Keywords • Oncology
• Disclosure
• Allegiance
Problem(s) • Non-financial conflicts of interest of review authors
• Financial conflicts of interest of review authors
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Meta-epidemiological analysis
First Author Country Australia
Aim To assess the disagreement across systematic reviews of mammography published between 2000 and 2015 and to determine whether author or design characteristics were associated with conclusions that were favourable to the use of mammography for routine breast cancer screening.
Level of Investigation Analytical
Summary of Findings 42% of conclusions were graded as favourable. Among conclusions produced by clinicians, 63% were graded as favourable compared to 32% from other authors. In the 50–69 age group where the largest proportion of systematic reviews were focused, conclusions drawn by authors without financial competing interests and non-clinicians were significantly less likely to be graded as favourable.
Number of systematic reviews included 50
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 2726
Treatment impacted Yes
Treatment impacted description Authors' professional roles or specialties of individual authors were recorded and categorised as clinicians or non-clinicians. Declared financial conflicts of interest and or/whether no disclosure statement was made were also noted.
Interpretation impacted Yes
Interpretation impacted description Conclusions drawn by authors without financial competing interests (odds ratio 0.06; 95% CI 0.07–0.56) and nonclinicians (odds ratio 0.11; 95% CI 0.01–0.84) were less likely to be graded as favourable. There was no trend in the proportion of favourable conclusions over time or between other review design characteristics and favourable conclusions.