Practice guideline of evidence-based medicine : Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (the PRISMA statement)

Abstract

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have become increasingly important in health care, especially in the field of evidence-based medicine (EBM). They are also now conducted to investigate diagnostic or prognostic questions, policy making, etc. Several early studies evaluated the quality of review reports, but the results were generally poor. In 1996, to address the suboptimal reporting of meta-analyses, an international group developed a guidance called the QUOROM statement (The Quality of Reporting of Meta-analyses), which focused on the reporting of meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials. In 2009, the managing committee has developed a revision of QUOROM, renamed PRISMA statement (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses), which have been updated to address several conceptual and practical advances in the science of systematic reviews. In this article, we summarized and explained the new PRISMA statement on the basis of our experience of having conducted systematic reviews and meta-analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]