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 Harms
Surgery
Pre-specification
Searching
Low methodological quality
Problem(s) Selective reporting of harms / safety / adverse events / side effects
Insufficient literature searches
Lack of prespecification in eligibility criteria
Funding or sponsor of systematic review not reported
Low methodological (AMSTAR) quality
Number of systematic reviews included 26
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.
Did the article find that the problem(s) led to qualitative changes in interpretation of the results? Not Applicable
Are the methods of the article described in enough detail to replicate the study? Yes