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Hi Neil,

I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, posted this article on my facebook saying the same!  It seems like the thrust of the article was against meta-analysis/reviews as shown by the title, and they just added that last line as an afterthought to soften the pushback

I found the '3%'  comment a bit weird. How did they calculate the 3%? And useful is very subjective and context dependent.

Here is my new article. Are RCT's still useful research? We are not sure :)



On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 7:06 AM, Pennington, Andy <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Not all systematic reviews are clinical.

 

All the best, Andy.

 

From: Evidence based health (EBH) <EVIDENCE-BASED-HEALTH@JISCMAIL.AC.UK> On Behalf Of Neil Pakenham-Walsh
Sent: 01 May 2018 11:49
To: EVIDENCE-BASED-HEALTH@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: Are systematic reviews and meta-analyses still useful research? We are not sure.

 

Thanks for this, Anoop,

There is a mismatch between the title and the content.

"Are systematic reviews and meta-analyses still useful research? We are not sure" implies that systematic reviews are not worth doing.

But the authors acknowledge that a minority 'are both well done and clinically useful'.

A better title would have been "Most systematic reviews and meta-analyses are not useful"

The authors refer to a previous paper (by one of them) that supposedly found that 3% of systematic reviews are not useful. This figure of 3% depends very much on the criteria used. To find this out, I accessed the paper in question (Ioannidis JP (2016) The mass production of redundant, misleading, and conflicted systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Milbank Q 94:485–514), but I could not find any reference to this 3% nor to the criteria used to evaluate usefulness.

One would assume that the figure is probably a lot higher if one considers only Cochrane reviews (do we have a comparable figure for Cochrane reviews?).

The underlying message is of course valid: Just as poor-quality (or clinically irrelevant) primary research is wasteful, so too is poor-quality (or clinically irrelevant) systematic review.

Best wishes, Neil

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HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is the coordinator of the HIFA campaign (Healthcare Information For All - www.hifa.org ), a global health community with more than 17,000 members in 177 countries. He is also current chair of the Dgroups Foundation (www.dgroups.info), which supports 700 communities of practice for international development, social justice and global health.  Twitter: @hifa_org   FB: facebook.com/HIFAdotORG     [log in to unmask]

At 15:51 30/04/2018, Anoop Balachandran wrote:

Another critical piece from Ioannidis:

Are systematic reviews and meta-analyses still useful research? We are not sure.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29663048?dopt=Abstract

 

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