Conducting a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis in Rehabilitation.

ABSTRACT: Systematic reviews (SRs) are reviews of the literature using a step-by-step approach in a systematic way. Meta-analyses (MAs) are SRs that employ statistical methods to combine the included studies to generate an effect estimate. In this paper, we summarize 10 steps for conducting SRs and MAs in the field of rehabilitation medicine: protocol, review team and funding, objectives and research question, literature search, study selection, risk of bias, data extraction, data analysis, reporting of results and conclusions, and publication and dissemination. There are currently 64,958 trials that contain the word "rehabilitation" in CENTRAL (the database of clinical trials in the Cochrane Library), and only 1,246 reviews and 237 protocols. There is an urgent need for rehabilitation physicians to engage and conduct systematic reviews and meta-analysis of a variety of rehabilitation interventions. Systematic reviews have become the foundation of clinical practice guidelines, health technology assessments, formulary inclusion decisions and to guide funding additional research in that area.