The amount of scientific and research studies that are published is overwhelming for even the most experienced researchers. The most important medical questions and hypotheses are studied by scientists and teams all over the world, sometimes with diverse and seemingly contradictory results, making decision-making difficult.
Meta-analysis presents a global perspective, I like to say “they look at everything from above”, and is a statistical procedure capable of integrating the findings of many independent studies, finding results and general trends that individual studies separately cannot.
A refined methodology is needed to search, select and review the multiple studies published on a specific topic and then combine and analyze the results. Meta-analysis generates research, designing new studies with less risk of bias, adding new variables and generating new hypotheses. This research allows the creation of new clinical guidelines to help health professionals make decisions.
All studies have biases and it is common to find published systematic reviews and meta-analyses that contain important flaws and poor methodology that may limit the validity of the results. To avoid this, there is sufficient statistical evidence to account for bias and control for it.
At OMEDICS we have set out to generate rigorous meta-analyses, improving the design, analysis, graphics, presentation, interpretation and publication of systematic reviews so that they continue to play a central role in evidence-based medicine.
