The effectiveness of bone density measurement and associated treatments for prevention of fractures: an international collaborative review

CRD COMMENTARY: This review is primarily a summary of other relevant systematic reviews and, as such, details of primary studies (design, participant characteristics) and of individual systematic reviews (validity assessment, methods of pooling data) are not presented. To comment fully upon the scientific rigour of this review, it would be necessary to obtain the original references. This is a very useful document in that it brings together and assesses previous work on BDM and associated treatments in the prevention of fractures. The narrative synthesis used is appropriate, as the quality and type of studies included are diverse, and relevant individual studies are described more fully in the text. The search strategy to find supplementary primary studies is given, as are details of the quality criteria used. It would be impractical to give details of all the primary studies included in the review, but some details of the individual systematic reviews (e.g. number of studies included in each) given in a tabular form may have been helpful in making the review clearer to the reader.