Article
Systematic Reviews in Neonatal Respiratory Care: Are Some Conclusions Misleading?
Fecha
2020Registro en:
Maturana A, Moya F and Donn SM (2020) Systematic Reviews in Neonatal Respiratory Care: Are Some Conclusions Misleading? Front. Pediatr. 8:7.
Autor
Maturana, Andres
Moya, Fernando
Donn, Steven M.
Institución
Resumen
An increasing amount of information is currently available in neonatal respiratory care.
Systematic reviews are an important tool for clinical decision-making. The challenge is to
combine studies that address a specific clinical question and have similar characteristics
in terms of populations, interventions, comparators, and outcomes, so that their combined results provide a more precise estimate of the effect that can be validly extrapolated into clinical practice. The concept of heterogeneity is reviewed, emphasizing that it should be considered in a wider perspective and not just as a mere statistical test. A case is made of how well-designed studies of the neonatal respiratory literature, when equivocally combined, can provide very precise but potentially biased results. Systematic reviews in this field and others should be rigorously peer-reviewed before publication to avoid misleading readers to potentially biased conclusions.