Medicine
-
Knee osteoarthritis (KOA), known as severe degenerative arthritis, commonly occurs in middle-aged and elderly people all over the world. Acupuncture as traditional oriental intervention is getting widely used and several systematic reviews (SRs) have reported the effectiveness of acupuncture on pain relief and functional recovery in patients with KOA. ⋯ According to the high-quality evidence, we concluded that acupuncture may have some advantages in treating KOA. However, there are some risk of bias and reporting deficiencies still needed to be improved.
-
Meta Analysis
The effect of zinc supplementation in pre-diabetes: A protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis.
The number of people with diabetes and pre-diabetes is growing exponentially. Human studies have shown that zinc supplementation is beneficial for pre-diabetes. However, owing to the low quality, small sample size, and methodological heterogeneity of these studies, this conclusion is not convincing. Consequently, in order to determine whether zinc supplementation is effective and safe in pre-diabetic patients, it is necessary to conduct a meta-analysis of high-quality clinical trials. ⋯ CRD 42018095724.
-
Ischemic stroke is a foremost cause for disability and death worldwide. This study is conducted in order to compare the diagnostic values between transcranial Doppler ultrasound (ultrasonography), computed tomography (CT), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in patients suffering from ischemic stroke by performing a network meta-analysis. ⋯ This network meta-analysis provides supporting evidence to the idea that DWI has a higher diagnostic value regarding ischemic stroke among MRI methods, and CTP has a poor diagnostic value among CT methods, which provide therapeutic considerations for Ischemic stroke intervention.
-
We performed the meta-analysis to evaluate the overall safety of programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) or ligand 1 (PD-L1) inhibitor treatment for lung cancer patients. ⋯ Compared with chemotherapy, RR of the treatment-related deaths associated with PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitor was significantly lower than that of the chemotherapy group, while it did not increase the RR when they were combined with chemotherapy or other drugs. When PD-1/PD-L1 was combined with chemotherapy, it increased the RR of adverse events leading to discontinuation.
-
We aimed to conduct a systematic review and network meta-analysis (NMA) of published studies to comprehensively compare and rank the efficacy and safety of pharmacological interventions for preventing nausea and vomiting after ambulatory surgery. ⋯ This systematic review and NMA will provide comprehensive and convincing evidence summarizing the efficacy and safety of pharmacological interventions for preventing nausea and vomiting after ambulatory surgery.