Analysis of European Association of Urology Guidelines 2023 and its adherence to GRADE methodology

Introduction

The European Association of Urology (EAU) has reported the use of a modified Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) approach for developing guideline recommendations since 2018; however, the full adoption of GRADE remains a work in progress.

Methods

Two members of the research team identified and independently abstracted all individual recommendations and summary of evidence statements available from all EAU guidelines published in 2023. We evaluated the current adherence to established criteria for appropriate GRADE use, the proportion of strong and weak recommendations, the underlying strength of evidence, and criteria for appropriate use of GRADE.

Results

We included a total of 20 guideline documents with a total number of 1985 recommendations. The median number of strong recommendations was 46 (interquartile range: 32–87), representing 62.6% of all recommendations. The surgical thromboprophylaxis guideline had the lowest percentage of strong recommendations (18.2%; 30/165), and the neuro-urology guideline had the highest percentage (95.5%; 42/44). EAU guidelines provided 2580 summaries of evidence statements, of which 1608 reported a level of evidence. The reported levels of evidence were I, II, III and IV/V at 31.8%, 28.5%, 32.4% and 7.3%, respectively. Of the six criteria for the appropriate use of GRADE, criterion 6, which reports the framing of recommendations as strong or weak, was met consistently; all other criteria were met only by a single guideline on thromboprophylaxis.

Conclusions

The EAU guidelines adoption of GRADE has been largely limited to the framing of recommendations as strong or weak. In all but one guideline, published guidelines did not meet any of the other criteria for appropriate GRADE use. Increased efforts to fully adopt GRADE, similar to its implementation in the thromboprophylaxis guideline in future editions, may enhance trust and uptake of EAU guidelines, thereby assisting policymakers and improving patient care.