Background: Systematic reviews and meta-analysis have significant advantages over conventional reviews in that all available data should be presented. This study aimed to evaluate Iranian systematic reviews and meta-analysis abstracts indexed in WOS and Scopus during 2003-2012 based on PRISMA checklist. Methods: This is an analytical study. We evaluated 46 article abstracts indexed in WOS, 89 a...

OBJECTIVES Our objectives were to analyse the effects of text messaging versus usual care in improving adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) in people living with HIV using individual patient data meta-analysis. Adjusted, sensitivity and subgroup analyses were conducted. SETTING 3 randomised controlled trials conducted between 2010 and 2012 in rural and urban centres in Cameroon and Kenya...

Evidence-based health care decision making requires comparison of all relevant competing interventions. In the absence of randomized controlled trials involving a direct comparison of all treatments of interest, indirect treatment comparisons and network meta-analysis provide useful evidence for judiciously selecting the best treatment(s). Mixed treatment comparisons, a special case of network ...

BACKGROUND Numerous tools and items have been developed in all health areas to assess the risk of bias of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). The Cochrane Collaboration (CC) released a new tool to assess bias in RCTs, based on empirical evidence quantifying the association between some design features and estimates of treatment effects (TEs). However, this evidence is limited to medicine and i...

In present study, a three-step multi-objective optimization algorithm of cyclone separators is catered for the design objectives. First, the pressure drop (Dp) and collection efficiency (h) in a set of cyclone separators are numerically evaluated. Secondly, two meta models based on the evolved Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH) type neural networks are regarded to model the Dp and h as the re...

objective: this study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of education based of the cognitive, metacognitive, and behavioral model on the reduction of meta-worry beliefs in patients with social anxiety disorder (sad). methods: the research was a quasi-experimental study with pretest-posttest design and a control group. the statistical population comprised all patients with sad referr...

IMPORTANCE A persistent dilemma when performing meta-analyses is whether all available trials should be included in the meta-analysis. OBJECTIVES To compare treatment outcomes estimated by meta-analysis of all trials and several alternative analytic strategies: single most precise trial (ie, trial with the narrowest confidence interval), meta-analysis restricted to the 25% largest trials, lim...