Survey of therReporting characteristics of systematic reviews in rehabilitation

BACKGROUND: Systematic reviews (SRs) have become increasingly important for informing clinical practice; however little is known about the reporting characteristics and the quality of the SRs relevant to practice of rehabilitation health professionals. OBJECTIVE: To examine the reporting quality of a representative sample of published SRs on rehabilitation. We focused on the descriptive, reporting and bias-related characteristics. METHODS: We performed a cross-sectional study searching Medline for aggregative and configurative SRs indexed in 2011, focused on rehabilitation as restoring of functional limitations. Two reviewers independently screened and selected the SRs and extracted data using a 38-item data collection form derived from PRISMA. The data were analyzed descriptively. RESULTS: We sampled 88 SRs published in 59 journals. The median compliance with the PRISMA items were 17 (63%) out of 27 items (IQR range 13 to 22 [48% to 82%]). Two-thirds (n=66) focused on interventions whom efficacy is best addressed through RCT design and almost all SRs included RCTs (63/66 [95%]). Over two-thirds of SRs assessed the quality of primary studies (74/88 [84%]). Twenty-eight reviews (28/88 [32%]) meta-analyzed the results for at least one outcome. One half of SRs founded a positive significance (46%) whereas a detrimental result was present only in one review. CONCLUSIONS: Our sample of SRs in the rehabilitation field shows heterogeneous characteristics and a moderate quality of reporting. Poor control of potential source of bias might be improved if more widely agreed upon evidence-based reporting guidelines will be actively endorsed and adhered to by authors and journals.