Evidence-based medicine is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence-based medicine means to integrate individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research. So evidence and its quality is the key issue of evidence-based medicine. The purpose of this article is to introduce to the healthcare professionals the sources of evidence and how to search for evidence for them.
Evidence has been retrieved through MEDLINE and Cochrane Libray about the treatment for patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease who suffered from on-off, dyskinesia and depression after chronic use of L-dopa. All of the evidence has been evaluated. Methods of evidence-based treatment were drawn up according to the evidence, clinciams’ experiences and patients’ preferences. All symptoms of the patient have been improved obviously.
ObjectiveTo systematically review the efficacy of antidepressants in the prevention of poststroke depression (PSD). MethodsWe searched The Cochrane Library (Issue 2, 2015), PubMed, MEDLINE, EMbase, CNKI and VIP databases to collect randomized controlled trials (RCTs) about antidepressants in preventing PSD from inception to April 2015. Two reviewers independently screened literature, extracted data and assessed the risk of bias of included studies. Then, meta-analysis was performed using RevMan 5.3 software. ResultsA total of 26 RCTs involving 2 190 patients were included. The results of meta-analysis showed that:compared with the control group, the antidepressants group could significantly reduce the incidence of PSD (OR=0.24, 95%CI 0.17 to 0.36, P<0.000 01). Subgroup analysis based on types of drugs showed that:the selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) could significantly reduce the incidence of PSD (OR=0.23, 95%CI 0.15 to 0.37, P<0.000 01). Subgroup analysis based on length of time showed that antidepressants could decrease the incidence of PSD in short term (OR=0.11, 95%CI 0.06 to 0.19, P<0.000 01), middle term (OR=0.31, 95%CI 0.21 to 0.46, P<0.000 01) and long term (OR=0.30, 95%CI 0.19 to 0.49, P<0.000 01). In addition, there was no statistical difference in the incidence of adverse effect between the antidepressants group and the control group (P>0.05). ConclusionAntidepressants is effective in the prevention of PSD, and may not affect patient's life quality. Due to the limited quantity and quality of included studies, more high quality studies are needed to verify the above conclusion.
In 2014, the new concept of embolic stroke of undetermined source (ESUS) was first proposed by cryptogenic stroke/ESUS International Working Group. In the past 5 years, related clinical researches of ESUS have been deepened, and the results of many large clinical studies have been published. However, the guiding significance of this new concept to clinical practice is still controversial. By reviewing the background, diagnostic criteria, assessment, common emboli sources, anticoagulant therapy research advances and related limitations of ESUS, and analyzing the possible causes of negative anticoagulant therapy results, we explored the clinical value of this new classification.
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for the design of clinical trials. Because of some practical difficulties, more and more researchers think that the appropriate use of non-randomized controlled trials may make up for the weakness of RCT and will achieve the same research purpose. Therefore, non-RCTs are also very important. Taking studies on multiple sclerosis for example, this article briefly introduces the significance of non-randomized contolled trials.