Evidence-Based Medicine Flashcards
Evidence-Based Medicine
The conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions
about the care of individual patients
Why do we need evidence based medicine
- Ensures medicines are of high quality
- recommendation made for patient and other health proffessionals in phsrmacy services
Secondary studies
- Clinical practice guidelines
- Meta analysis systematic review
Experimental study design
1 level of evidence
- Randomised control trials prospective test treatment
Level 3 source of evidence
Case control study
- Subjects have outcomes of interest looking for risk factors
observtional study
Cross-sectional study
- Doesn’t concider time doesn’t tell causation
- Obsrvations occour concurently
- Participants are selected based on set inclusion and exclusion criteria
- Population based research
Experimental studies
Animal lab studies
- Animal research uses animals to test potential pharmaceuticals prior to human trials
Disadvantages of animal study
- Application is limited considering the difference between human
and animal physiology - Experiments are undertaken in a highly controlled environment
Groups in cross sectional study
- Exposed and outcome present
- Exposed and no outcome
- Uexposed and outcome present
- Unexposed and no outcome
Advantages of cross sectional case control study
- Less expensive
- Easier to do and take less time
- Useful when obtaining follow-up data that is difficult to obtain due to
the nature of population being studied - More efficient if the disease is rare
- This design may be the only ethical way to evaluate something
Disadvantage of case-control study
- Potential recall bias
- Subject to selection bias
- Generally do not allow investigators to calculate an incidence (new cases can’t use retrospective data) or absolute risk
Cohort study
- Outcome is not know
- Identify 2 cohort one recives intervention other not exposed
- Follow and observe to see effect
- Almost always prospective, but sometimes can be
retrospective
Advantages of cohort study
- Can more clearly show the time of exposure and development of the outcome
- Allows for evaluation of more than one outcome as it relates to an exposure
- Allows for calculation of incidence (in new cases)
Disadvantage of cohort studies
- Can be expensive and time needing follow up
- loss of follow up introduces bias
- May not be good for rare disease
Randomised controlled trial
- Randomly assign subject to either have control (placebo) or new medication
- Is a prospective study
Advantages of random control trial
- Considered the gold standard
- This design allows for washout of most population bias
- Reduced influence by confounders
- Reduced variability in the outcome(s)
- Easier to blind patients than observational studies
Disadvantages of randomised contol trial
- Time consuming trial
- Tend to be more expensive
Sytamatic review
- Locates, appraise and synthesize the best available evidence relating to a specific research question and evidence-based answers.
- How to deliver interventions or to make changes to policy
Meta-analysis
- Summarize the results of
independent studies by combining information from all relevant studies - More precise estimates of the effects of health care than those derived from the individual studies included within a review
Advantages of Meta-analysis
- Objective evalulation of reseach findings
Disadvantage of meta-analysis
- Not all topics have sufficient research evidence to allow a meta-analysis to be conducted
Advantages of NICE guidelines
- Thorough and transparent development process to ensure fairness.
- Representative stakeholders involved in the process.
- Directly applicable to patients.
- Often take into account a huge number of potential treatments and drug classes, e.g. type 2 diabetes guidelines.
- Complex issues simplified.
- Regularly reviewed.
- Take into account cost considerations
Disadvantages of NICE guidelines
- May involve conflict of interest however resolved by conflict of interest
- Large amount of resources required
Primary endpoint
- The main result/s that is measured at the end of a
study to see if a given intervention was effective - ,ust be clinically relevant