Reporting quality appraisal of clinical practice guidelines on gastric cancer

Article type
Authors
Ling J1, Chen YJ2, Xun YQ1, Ge L1, Chen YL1, Yang K1
1Evidence-Based Medicine Center, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Lanzhou University, Key Laboratory of Evidence Based Medicine and Knowledge Translation of Gansu Province, Chinese GRADE Center, Lanzhou University
2School of Public Health, Gansu, Evidence-Based Social Science Center, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou
Abstract
Background:
Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are of great importance to the treatment provided by clinical physicians, so the quality of CPGs should be an essential issue for clinical work. As a consequence, adaptation of high-quality existing guidelines should be a very important aspect of perfecting clinical practice. Though gastric cancers are being increasingly detected, their evaluation and management are still debated, and the CPGs for these are unclear. Therefore, it is essential that we determine the quality of CPGs on gastric cancer. The RIGHT (Reporting Items for practice Guidelines in Healthcare) checklist consisting of 22 items can assist guideline developers in reporting guidelines, support journal editors and peer reviewers when considering guideline reports, and help healthcare practitioners understand and implement guidelines.

Objectives:
To analyze available CPGs on gastric cancer with the RIGHT checklist in order to evaluate their reporting quality.

Methods: Systematically, we searched electronic databases including PubMed, the Cochrane Library, the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure, the Chinese Biomedical Literature database, the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure WanFang database from the inception to January 2018. We also searched the Guidelines International Network database, the National Guideline Clearinghouse, the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and Google to identify additional potential guidelines. Two independent assessors used the RIGHT instrument to create a systematic appraisal for 22 items to determine which guidelines fulfilled the inclusion and exclusion criteria. We assessed each item as 'Yes' for total compliance, 'Unclear' for partial compliance or 'No' for non-compliance. The number and proportion of reported items for each guideline were also calculated. We produced statistical analyses using SPSS version 15.0 for Windows.

Results and conclusions:
This study is ongoing and results will be presented at the Cochrane Colloquium as available.

Patient or healthcare consumer involvement:
Patients' data were involved.