News

It is with great sadness that the PRISMA group acknowledges the passing of a dear friend and colleague, Professor Alessandro Liberati. Alessandro passed away on January 1^st, 2012 at the age of 57 in Modena, Italy after a long battle with multiple myeloma. In his 25 years working to improve evidence-based healthcare, he made a number of important scientific contributions. In addition to being instrumental to the development of PRISMA and leading the development of the Explanatory document, Alessandro was the founding director of the Italian Cochrane Centre and his research helped make quality of life assessment a standard part of clinical trials in Italy. In a recent published contribution, Alessandro called for a new governance strategy which would enable stakeholders and researchers to make decisions about which treatments to study and outcomes to evaluate based on their relevance to patients. Alessandro eagerly contributed to an upcoming PRISMA extension for protocols until at least one month before his passing; his passion for high standards in scientific research and determination to push forward patient-centred research, will be deeply missed.

Systematic review register - PROSPERO - launched! -March 22, 2011

We are pleased to announce that PROSPERO, the first online facility to prospectively register systematic reviews, was launched in February 2011. PROSPERO is a global initiative led by the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination, University of York. To find out more, click on the following link: www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/

Please forward this message and link to your colleagues!

Instructions for Authors of UK NIHR Health Technology Assessment programme (HTA) reports - January 6, 2011

The UK HTA program has released a guidance and resources for authors. It provides very specific requirements on reporting and refer very clearly to the use of appropriate guidelines, including PRISMA. PRISMA is highlighted as the guideline to use when preparing HTA reports and a PRISMA checklist is required with submission of the final HTA report.

The guidance aims to help authors with the preparation of HTA reports commissioned by the HTA program, which are subsequently published in the journal Health Technology Assessment and available on the HTA website.

Link to the guidance: http://www.hta.ac.uk/investigators/rfa.pdf

PRISMA webinar available on YouTube - Sept 15, 2010

Listen to David Moher's webinar for the Cochrane Canada spring series, entitled Crystal clear reporting: importance of using PRISMA for systematic reviews. The video run 57 minutes long and gives a run through of why transparent reporting is important, how checklists can help, how to develop a reporting guideline, what different organizations are doing towards improve reporting, PRISMA Statement and other resources. http://www.youtube.com/user/pahopin#p/c/453DD53E93169678/3/TVFYenon1Jo


Five top medical journals publish research guidelines developed in Ottawa
An international group led by Dr. David Moher of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI) and the University of Ottawa has today released guidelines to improve how highly influential reviews of medical and health research are reported. The guidelines address systematic reviews and meta-analyses, which are considered the ‘gold standard’ of medical evidence because they systematically combine and summarize all research from around the world on a given topic.

“Systematic reviews and meta-analyses frequently form the basis for clinical decisions, but evidence suggests that in many cases these reviews are conducted and reported poorly,” said Dr. Moher, a Senior Scientist at OHRI and Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Ottawa. “Our guideline will help ensure that all relevant information is included in these reviews, so that better and more informed health decisions can be made.”

The guideline is called the PRISMA Statement (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) and it is published in Annals of Internal Medicine, PLoS Medicine, Open Medicine, the British Medical Journal and the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. Among other things, it includes a 27-item checklist and flow chart to follow when reporting a systematic review or meta-analysis.

The PRISMA Statement will promote more complete and transparent presentation of syntheses of research findings,” said Dr. Ian Graham, Vice President, Knowledge Translation at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). “The Group’s work in developing these guidelines is an important international contribution to improving the quality of health research.”

By improving the reporting and hopefully the conduct of synthesis and meta-analysis research, this work will also improve decision making by clinicians, policy makers and the public by providing them with important information on which to judge the quality and potential usefulness of the health information they are considering,” Dr. Graham added.

Dr. Moher and his colleagues are encouraging medical journals and editorial groups to endorse the PRISMA Statement and include it in their publishing instructions for authors. More than 2,500 systematic reviews are published in English every year.

Development of the PRISMA Statement was funded by CIHR; Universita di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy; Cancer Research UK; Clinical Evidence BMJ Knowledge; the Cochrane Collaboration; and GlaxoSmithKline, Canada. For more information, see www.prisma-statement.org.

This OHRI Newsroom release appeared on July 21, 2009.