A cross-sectional analysis of harms reporting in systematic reviews evaluating laminectomy

Ref ID 873
First Author H. Howard
Journal NORTH AMERICAN SPINE SOCIETY JOURNAL
Year Of Publishing 2023
URL https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666548422001019?via%3Dihub
Keywords • Low methodological quality
• Searching
• Surgery
• Harms
• Pre-specification
Problem(s) • Funding or sponsor of systematic review not reported
• Low methodological (AMSTAR) quality
• Selective reporting of harms / safety / adverse events / side effects
• Insufficient literature searches
• Lack of prespecification in eligibility criteria
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country United States
Checklists • AMSTAR 2
Aim To evaluate the completeness of harms reporting in systematic reviews on laminectomy.
Level of Investigation Analytical
Summary of Findings From 26 included systematic reviews that evaluated laminectomy for any indication indexed across MEDLINE (PubMed and Ovid), Embase, Epistemonikos, and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews in May 2022. The study authors found that two systematic reviews had completely omitted harms, 9 systematic reviews had between 0% and 50.0% harms item completion, and the 15 systematic reviews had > 50.01% harms item completion. The AMSTAR-2 evaluation graded 25 systematic reviews (25/26, 96.2%) as ‘critically low’ and 1 systematic review (1/26, 3.8%) as ‘low’. None of the included systematic reviews met the threshold for ‘moderate’ or ‘high’ quality designation.
Number of systematic reviews included 26
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 1794
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description