BMJ 2001;323:157-162 ( 21 July )

Education and debate

Systematic reviews in health care

Systematic reviews of evaluations of diagnostic and screening tests

This is the third in a series of four articles

Jonathan J Deeks, senior medical statistician. 

Imperial Cancer Research Fund/NHS Centre for Statistics in Medicine, Institute of Health Sciences, Oxford OX3 7LF

Correspondence to: J J Deeks J.Deeks@icrf.icnet.uk

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

Tests are routinely used in medicine to screen for, diagnose, grade, and monitor the progression of disease. Diagnostic information is obtained from a multitude of sources, including imaging and biochemical technologies, pathological and psychological investigations, and signs and symptoms elicited during history taking and clinical examinations.¹ Each of these items of information can be regarded as a result of a separate diagnostic or screening "test." Systematic reviews of evaluations of tests are undertaken for the same reasons as systematic reviews of treatment interventions: to produce estimates of test performance and impact based on all available evidence, to evaluate the quality of published studies, and to account for variation in findings between studies.^2-5 Reviews of studies of diagnostic accuracy involve the same key stages of defining questions, searching the literature, evaluating studies for eligibility and quality, and extracting and synthesising data. However, studies that evaluate the accuracy of tests have a . . . [Full text of this article]

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Rapid Responses:

Read all Rapid Responses

Recalculating data doesn't add information

G H Hall
bmj.com, 21 Jul 2001 [Full text]

Errors in Figure 2

Frank Shann
bmj.com, 27 Jul 2001 [Full text]

unconditional likelihood ratios are not constants

Gerben ter Riet, et al.
bmj.com, 26 Jul 2001 [Full text]

Corrections to Figure 2

Jonathan J Deeks
bmj.com, 27 Jul 2001 [Full text]

Odds ratio not prevalence independent

Nicole Jill-Marie Blackman
bmj.com, 9 Aug 2001 [Full text]

Effect of intra and inter-observer variation on systematic reviews of evaluations of clinical tests

J Bernades, et al.
bmj.com, 5 Sep 2001 [Full text]