Maelstrom Research guidelines for rigorous retrospective data harmonization

Maelstrom Research guidelines for rigorous retrospective data harmonization

Background It is widely accepted and acknowledged that data harmonization is crucial: in its absence, the co-analysis of major tranches of high quality extant data is liable to inefficiency or error. However, despite its widespread practice, no formalized/systematic guidelines exist to ensure high quality retrospective data harmonization. Methods To better understand real-world harmonization ...

Toward Rigorous Data Harmonization in Cancer Epidemiology Research: One Approach.

Cancer epidemiologists have a long history of combining data sets in pooled analyses, often harmonizing heterogeneous data from multiple studies into 1 large data set. Although there are useful websites on data harmonization with recommendations and support, there is little research on best practices in data harmonization; each project conducts harmonization according to its own internal standa...

Is rigorous retrospective harmonization possible? Application of the DataSHaPER approach across 53 large studies.

BACKGROUND Proper understanding of the roles of, and interactions between genetic, lifestyle, environmental and psycho-social factors in determining the risk of development and/or progression of chronic diseases requires access to very large high-quality databases. Because of the financial, technical and time burdens related to developing and maintaining very large studies, the scientific commu...

The Significance of Data Harmonization for Credentialing Research

Retrospective but not rigorous.

To the Editor:—We read with much interest the article by Biki et al. regarding the effect of anesthetic technique and postoperative analgesia on the cancer recurrence rate after open radical prostatectomy. The results suggesting that epidural anesthesia/analgesia lowers the rate of recurrence are certainly intriguing; however, we are concerned with the lack of detailed information presented in ...