Guideline panels need to process a sizeable amount of information to issue a decision on whether to recommend a health technology or not. Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) is being frequently applied in guideline development to facilitate this task, typically for the synthesis of effectiveness research. Questions regarding the accuracy of medical tests are ubiquitous, and they temporally precede questions about therapy. However, literature summarising the experience of applying GRADE approach to accuracy evaluations is not as rich as one for effectiveness evidence. Type of study design (cross-sectional), two-dimensional nature of the performance measures (sensitivity and specificity), propensity towards a higher level of between-study heterogeneity, poor reporting of quality features and uncertainty about how best to assess for publication bias among other features make this task challenging. This article presents solutions adopted to addresses above challenges for judicious estimation of the strength of test accuracy evidence used to inform evidence syntheses for guideline development.
Systematic reviews have become the cornerstone of evidence-based healthcare. Approximately half of the systematic reviews are out of date after 5.5 years, and keeping them up to date remains a huge challenge. Despite new guidance on when and how to update systematic reviews, there seems to be a lack of guidance on how to report updates of systematic reviews. Therefore, we decided to systematically analyse instruction for authors in biomedical journals regarding guidance on reporting updates of systematic reviews. We conducted a survey investigating 250 journals. The journal list was derived by a twofold strategy. First, we chose a list of journals that were included in a recently published survey of systematic reviews. This list was augmented by a PubMed search for published updates of systematic reviews. For each journal, we checked the instructions for authors for any content or links related to updating systematic reviews in September 2016. Out of 250 journals, we found only one with guidance clearly related to updates of systematic reviews, namely the BioMed Central journal, Systematic Reviews Nevertheless, concrete guidance on reporting is lacking as it is stated that authors are encouraged to be innovative in how to report and present systematic review updates. This makes clear that there remains a fundamental uncertainty of how authors willing to update a previously published systematic review should act as even the leading journal in evidence syntheses does not have clear guidance. Debate is necessary on how to report updates of systematic reviews.