Background: Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) aim to provide evidence-based guidance to inform individual patient and health policy decision-making. They should ideally be based on high quality systematic reviews, for example as provided by Cochrane. Uptake of Cochrane Reviews by guideline developers also represents an important measure of relevance and impact for Cochrane.
Objectives: We performed this study to assess the uptake of Cochrane Reviews in urological guidelines.
Methods: We retrieved the most up-to-date version of CPGs by five major guideline developers relevant to urology, namely those of the European Association of Urology (EAU), the American Urological Association (AUA), the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN), and United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF). Two independent reviewers abstracted the number of citations of Cochrane Reviews and the review group from which they came.
Results: We identified a total of 66 CPGs; the largest number was published by the EAU (n = 26) and AUA (n = 20), followed by the USPSTF (n = 8), NCCN (n = 6) and NICE (n = 6). Less than half (30/66; 45.5%) of all CPGs cited at least one Cochrane Review. Overall, Cochrane Reviews were cited 199 times. The proportion of CPGs by different organizations that cited at least one Cochrane Review was 83.3%, 61.5%, 50,0%, 20.0% and 16.6% for NICE, EAU, USPSTF, AUA and NCCN, respectively. The largest contributions of cited Cochrane Reviews originated from the Incontinence (29.1%), Prostatic Diseases and Urological Cancers (23.6%), Pain Palliative and Supportive (17.6%), and Renal (12.1%) Groups.
Conclusions: The uptake of Cochrane Reviews by CPGs developers for the field of urology is suboptimal, especially in the USA. Increased efforts to promote high quality systematic reviews by the relevant Cochrane groups are therefore critically important.