Background: Obesity has been associated to negative effects on natural fertility and a worse prognosis when assisted reproduction techniques are performed. Patients attending for fertility treatments are often advised to optimize their weights to improve outcomes. There are doubts about how effective are weight-loss interventions for improving fertility in women who are overweight or obese. Mat...

OBJECTIVE To assess the impact of the 2004 extension of the CONSORT guidelines on the reporting and methodological quality of cluster randomised trials. DESIGN Methodological review of 300 randomly sampled cluster randomised trials. Two reviewers independently abstracted 14 criteria related to quality of reporting and four methodological criteria specific to cluster randomised trials. We comp...

Randomised trials can provide excellent evidence of treatment benefit in medicine. Over the last 50 years, they have been cemented in the regulatory requirements for the approval of new treatments. Randomised trials make up a large and seemingly high-quality proportion of the medical evidence-base. However, it has also been acknowledged that a distorted evidence-base places a severe limitation ...