BMJ 1999;318:1623 ( 12 June )

Letters

Antibiotics for acute sinusitis in general practice

    Entry criteria were too dissimilar for studies to be combined for meta-analysis
    Authors' reply

Entry criteria were too dissimilar for studies to be combined for meta-analysis

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR---De Ferranti et al's meta-analysis on antibiotics in acute sinusitis could be criticised in many ways.1 Published in the General Practice section of the BMJ, it is presumably aimed at general practitioners.

The authors first looked at randomised controlled trials on the effectiveness of antibiotic against non-antibiotic management and then carried out a meta-analysis of the six placebo controlled trials they identified. It is implied that the patients being randomised were similar in each of the studies, so that a meta-analysis could be performed. This is not the case. One of the papers (that by Wald et al, in 1986) concerned the treatment of children and cannot be combined with the other five papers, which were adult studies.

Table 1 in the authors' paper shows the clinical settings and the entry criteria for the other five studies. In looking at this, readers have to identify which study is . . . [Full text of this article]
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Relevant Article

Are amoxycillin and folate inhibitors as effective as other antibiotics for acute sinusitis? A meta-analysis
Sarah D de Ferranti, John P A Ioannidis, Joseph Lau, William V Anninger, and Michael Barza
BMJ 1998 317: 632-637. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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