A review found heterogeneous approaches and insufficient reporting in overviews on adverse events

Ref ID 905
First Author T. Sachse
Journal JOURNAL OF CLINICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY
Year Of Publishing 2022
URL https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0895435622001925?via%3Dihub
Keywords • Overviews/Umbrella Reviews
• Certainty
• Overlapping reviews/redundancy
• Low reporting quality
• Pharmacological
• Harms
Problem(s) • Lack of guidance or consistency in systematic overview / umbrella / review of systematic reviews
• Methods not described to enable replication
• Reasons for excluding potentially eligible studies not provided
• Funding or sponsor of systematic review not reported
• Individual study characteristics not reported sufficiently
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country Germany
Aim To investigate reporting and methodological characteristics of overviews on adverse (drug-associated) events (AEs) of pharmacological interventions.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings From 27 included systematic overview reviews of adverse (drug-associated) events (AEs) of pharmacological interventions indexed across MEDLINE, Embase, Epistemonikos, and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews from inception to May 17, 2021. The median number of included systematic reviews in each overview was 15 (interquartile range 7–34). Study selection methods were reported in 52%, methods for data extraction in 67%, and methods for critical appraisal in 63% of overviews. An assessment of methodological quality of included systematic reviews was performed in 70% of overviews. Only 22% of overviews reported strategies for dealing with overlapping systematic reviews. An assessment of the certainty of the evidence was performed in 33% of overviews.
Number of systematic reviews included 27
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 1425
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description