Background:
These days more and more systematic reviews (SRs) are published to measure patients' values and preferences in different areas of diseases, but their methodological quality is varied and unclear. The AMSTAR II (A MeaSurement Tool to Assess systematic Reviews II) checklist consisting of 16 items can assist decision makers in the identification of high quality systematic reviews, including those based on randomised or non-randomised studies of healthcare interventions, or both.
Objectives:
We conducted an overview to evaluate the methodological quality of SRs about patients' values and preferences during the development of clinical practice guidelines.
Methods:
We included SRs of patient values and preferences prior to July 2017 by searching the Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, Embase, the Chinese Biomedical Database (CBM), China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), and the Wanfang Database . Independently, two authors selected studies, extracted data, and evaluated the methodological quality of patients' values and preferences using the AMSTAR II tool.
Results:
We included 57 SRs involving a total of 1355 studies in this overview. The results of AMSTAR II showed that the lowest quality was “a list of a list of excluded studies item” which only one (1.8%, 1/57) study provided, followed by the “use a satisfactory technique for assessing the risk of bias (RoB) in individual studies that were included in the review” item with which only six (10.5%, 6/57) studies conformed. The next was the “authors account for RoB in individual studies when interpreting/discussing the results of the review” item, with only nine (15.8%, 9/57) studies conforming. Item 3 (authors perform study selection in duplicate) and item 16 (the review authors report any potential sources of conflict of interest) were reported as having been conducted in 36 (63.2%, 36/57), indicating inadequate methodological quality.
Conclusions:
The variable methodological quality of the included SRs about patients' preferences was not high; SRs addressing patients' preferences of better methodological quality are needed.
Patient or healthcare consumer involvement: Patient data were involved.