Adequacy of risk of bias assessment in surgical vs non-surgical trials in Cochrane reviews: a methodological study

Ref ID 790
First Author O. Barcot
Journal BMC MEDICAL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Year Of Publishing 2020
URL https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12874-020-01123-7
Keywords • Cochrane
• Surgery
• Author
• Risk of bias
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 the adequacy of risk of bias assessments in surgical versus non-surgical RCTs included in Cochrane reviews published between July 2015 and June 2016 in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and to assess the most common differences in those risk of bias assessments.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings From 729 included Cochrane reviews published between July 2015 and June 2016 in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. The prevalence of adequate risk of bias judgments for all analysed risk of bias domains was generally higher in surgical trials than in non-surgical trials. For two risk of bias domains assessing blinding, this difference between surgical and non-surgical trials was statistically significant (P < 0.001), for allocation concealment test power, was too low (P = 0.039, beta < 0.8), while the difference between two types of trials was not significant for risk of bias domain regarding randomization (P = 0.124).
Number of systematic reviews included 729
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 729
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description