A PRISMA assessment of the reporting quality of systematic reviews or meta-analysis of interventions on diabetic nephropathy

Article type
Authors
An N1, Ge L1, Liu YC1, Xu JF1, Liang L1, Ma JC1, Wang J2, Shi XT1, Tian JH2
1The First Clinical College of Lanzhou University, China
2Evidence-Based Medicine Center, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Lanzhou University, China
Abstract
Background: Diabetes prevalence has increased worldwide. Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is a common complication in diabetes and a crucial issue of public health. More and more Systematic Reviews (SRs) and Meta-analyses(MAs) on DN with different angles and opinions are emerging published these years. Even though SRs have become an increasingly popular source of up-to-date knowledge but the current report quality situation is not clearly.

Objectives: To critically assess the report quality of SRs/MAs of interventions on DN by PRISMA.

Methods: A SRs/MAs literature search of eight database was used to identify interventions on DN published up September 8, 2012 by two independent reviewers. According to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, two reviewers extracted the data independently. The quality of the SRs/MAs were assessed by the PRISMA.All related data was analyses by SPSS19.0, Meta Analyst and Excel.

Results: 891 studies were found in eight database, 64 were selected for analysis, most (57, 89.1%) of which used the terms SR (33, 51.6%) , followed by MA (23, 36.0%) and both SR and MA (2, 3.1%) in the title. The PRISMA checklist score (Table 1) range from 9 to 25, the average score was 18.24 ± 3.22.The report quality of included literatures has problems in different levels. A score in 21–27(14, 21.875%) indicated provide complete information, relatively; 15–21 (44, 68.75%), little information deficiency; below 15 (16, 9.375%), severe information deficiency. From Figure 1 show the significance between the impact factors, the report quality of SCI, university and author’s3were better than non-SCI, hospital and single author (P < 0.05).

Conclusions: PRISMA reporting guidelines on diabetic nephropathy is low for many included literatures and different literatures have problems in various levels. As a key data source of information for clinicians and researchers, focusing on improving the report quality is more necessary rather than continuing to publish them in large quantity, which requires to widen our future focus on.