Towards evidence-based medicine for paediatricians

Lumps or granules? You may well enjoy a lump of sugar in your tea, a fine cucumber sandwich and a round of croquet. Or you could prefer a sprinkling of the more crystalline version beaten with butter, vanilla essence, flour and salt and baked lightly into shortbread, eaten before a roaring fire. Neither really has any relevance to if you should consider—when looking at a piece of evidence synthesis—if it is reasonable to lump the studies together or split them into separate grains. When you are considering one of the key questions in a systematic review1—how did they synthesise the data—it can be good to think about the amount of difference between the studies clinically and also consider the uncertainty in each result. It could be that the lumping is of different versions of a drug, for example, third-generation cephalosporins and piperacillin/tazobactam, looking at how effective they...
Source: Archives of Disease in Childhood - Category: Pediatrics Authors: Tags: ADC Archimedes Source Type: research