Systematic reviews play a crucial role in this era of Evidence Based Medicine and clinical guidelines. Systematic reviews use a systematic and transparent approach to identify all relevant articles, appraise the risk of bias, examine sources of variation, and, if appropriate, meta-analyse the results of the primary studies. This course will offer a mix of lectures and practicals that will help the student to perform all of these steps in practice. In addition, specific challenges to systematic reviews and new developments will be highlighted.
In this course we expect the student to have a basic understanding of the principles of clinical epidemiology, in a particular about the design, conduct & analysis of a therapeutic randomized controlled trial. This includes the role of randomisation, the various types of blinding and commonly used effect measures (e.g. odds ratio, relative risk, risk difference, hazard ratio).
By the end of the course, you should be able to:
- Explain the rationale for performing a systematic review
- List the key steps of a systematic review
- Formulate a proper review question addressing a therapeutic dilemma
- Understand the design of a comprehensive and efficient search strategy to identify relevant RCT’s in electronic bibliographic databases
- Explain the main types of bias in a therapeutic study
- Assess primary studies (RCT) for their risk of bias and report these findings
- Explain the difference between fixed and random effects approach and their assumptions
- Perform & interpret the findings of a meta-analysis (fixed & random approach)
- Interpret the different measures of heterogeneity
- Interpret the results of a meta-regression model
- List and explain the different types of reporting bias
- Critically appraise systematic reviews
Our Professors
Lotty Hooft
Lotty Hooft is lecturer of the specialization courses Systematic Reviews in Intervention Research, Systematic Reviews in Diagnostic Research and Systematic Reviews of Prognostic Studies.
More information about dr. L. Hooft can be found here
Pauline Heus PhD
More information about dr. P. Heus can be found here