Assessment Of Risk Of Bias Essay

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Assessment of risk of bias in the included study. Firstly I choose this point as it is considered a unique point in the checklist of items included in the systematic review and its importance in the final effect and validity of the study. Nowadays in the medical field the ability of the clinicians to read the published clinical trials become more difficult. In systematic review the available evidence on a specific clinical problem are summarized which make the systematic review studies become apart of decision making in the evidence based in medicine. The results of the included studies in the systematic review are determined whether they may affected by bias and this is the key role of the systematic review studies. An example for this are …show more content…

Cochrane risk of bias tool is an example in which seven types of common biases are covered involving the extracting of the sentences from the articles to approve the bias assessment of the researchers(1). Bias assessments are decisive or key in the interpretation of the published clinical trials and evidences. Manual assessing of this risk is little difficult for the clinical researchers due to unique development of the medical literature base(2). As the number of the published clinical trials increase in the last few years , the manual assessment of each trial become burdensome an may by impossible to achieved and this is beyond our ability to make a resource constriction(3). Importance of assessment of risk of bias: Assessment of risk of bias is a key step in conducting systematic reviews that informs many other steps and decisions made within the review. It also plays an important role in the final assessment of the strength of the evidence. It is important to improve the steps included in accomplishment of evidence base medicine to keep systematic reviews and related studies produced currently(4). Tool for assessing the bias in the clinical trials studies is developed in the Cochrane collaboration and documented throughout all the Cochrane systematic reviews since …show more content…

These scales and checklists included between three and fifty seven items and were found to take from ten to fourty five minutes to complete for each study. Almost all of the items in the instruments were based on suggested or ‘generally accepted’ criteria that are mentioned in clinical trial textbooks. Many instruments also contained items that were not directly related to internal validity, such as whether a power calculation was done (an item that relates more to the precision of the results) or whether the inclusion and exclusion criteria were clearly described (an item that relates more to applicability than validity). Scales were more likely than checklists to include criteria that do not directly relate to internal validity (14). The Collaboration’s recommended tool for assessing risk of bias is neither a scale nor a checklist. It is a domain-based evaluation, in which critical assessments are made separately for different domains, described in Section 8.5. It was developed between 2005 and 2007 by a working group of methodologists, editors and review authors. Because it is impossible to know the extent of bias (or even the true risk of bias) in a given study, the possibility of validating any proposed tool is limited. The most realistic assessment of the validity of a study may involve subjectivity: for

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