Mainoli, Beatrice Machado, Tiago Duarte, Gonçalo S. Prada, Luísa Gonçalves, Nilza Ferreira, Joaquim J. Costa, João
Published in
BMC Medical Research Methodology
Background The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage on, and clinical research has been promoted worldwide. We aimed to assess the clinical and methodological characteristics of treatment clinical trials that have been set forth as an early response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods First, we reviewed all registered clinical trials on COVID-19. The W...
Jabre, Joe F. Bland, Jeremy D.P.
Published in
BMC Medical Research Methodology
Background To validate e-norms methodology in establishing a reference range for body mass index measures. A new method, the extrapolated norms (e-norms) method of determining normal ranges for biological variables is easy to use and recently was validated for several biological measurements. We aimed to determine whether this new method provides B...
Mahar, Robert K. McGuinness, Myra B. Chakraborty, Bibhas Carlin, John B. IJzerman, Maarten J. Simpson, Julie A.
Published in
BMC Medical Research Methodology
Background Dynamic treatment regimens (DTRs) formalise the multi-stage and dynamic decision problems that clinicians often face when treating chronic or progressive medical conditions. Compared to randomised controlled trials, using observational data to optimise DTRs may allow a wider range of treatments to be evaluated at a lower cost. This revie...
Mölenberg, Famke J. M. de Vries, Chris Burdorf, Alex van Lenthe, Frank J.
Published in
BMC Medical Research Methodology
Background Most health surveys have experienced a decline in response rates. A structured approach to evaluate whether a decreasing - and potentially more selective - response over time biased estimated trends in health behaviours is lacking. We developed a framework to explore the role of differential non-response over time. This framework was app...
Khan, Mir Baz Nausheen, Sidrah Hussain, Imtiaz Hackett, Kristy Zehra, Kaneez Feroze, Khalid Canning, David Shah, Iqbal Soofi, Sajid Bashir
Published in
BMC Medical Research Methodology
Background Data collection is the most critical stage in any population health study and correctly implementing fieldwork enhances the quality of collected information. However, even the most carefully planned large-scale household surveys can encounter many context-specific issues. This paper reflected on our research team’s recent experience cond...
Gvozdenović, Emilia Malvisi, Lucio Cinconze, Elisa Vansteelandt, Stijn Nakanwagi, Phoebe Aris, Emmanuel Rosillon, Dominique
Published in
BMC Medical Research Methodology
Background Randomized controlled trials are considered the gold standard to evaluate causal associations, whereas assessing causality in observational studies is challenging. Methods We applied Hill’s Criteria, counterfactual reasoning, and causal diagrams to evaluate a potentially causal relationship between an exposure and outcome in three publis...
Johansen, Martin Nygård Lundbye-Christensen, Søren Larsen, Jacob Moesgaard Parner, Erik Thorlund
Published in
BMC Medical Research Methodology
Background Time-to-event data that is subject to interval censoring is common in the practice of medical research and versatile statistical methods for estimating associations in such settings have been limited. For right censored data, non-parametric pseudo-observations have been proposed as a basis for regression modeling with the possibility to ...
Chowell, Gerardo Luo, Ruiyan
Published in
BMC Medical Research Methodology
Background Ensemble modeling aims to boost the forecasting performance by systematically integrating the predictive accuracy across individual models. Here we introduce a simple-yet-powerful ensemble methodology for forecasting the trajectory of dynamic growth processes that are defined by a system of non-linear differential equations with applicat...
Adobes Martin, Milagros Santamans Faustino, Sala Llario Almiñana, Inmaculada Aiuto, Riccardo Rotundo, Roberto Garcovich, Daniele
Published in
BMC medical research methodology
To evaluate the completeness of reporting abstracts of systematic reviews (SRs) before and after the publication of the PRISMA-A checklist in 2013 and to assess if an association exists between abstract characteristics and the completeness of reporting. A systematic search of the literature was conducted in the PubMed and Scopus databases in March ...
de Vocht, Frank Katikireddi, Srinivasa Vittal McQuire, Cheryl Tilling, Kate Hickman, Matthew Craig, Peter
Published in
BMC medical research methodology
Natural or quasi experiments are appealing for public health research because they enable the evaluation of events or interventions that are difficult or impossible to manipulate experimentally, such as many policy and health system reforms. However, there remains ambiguity in the literature about their definition and how they differ from randomize...
