Reporting of weighted event rates in Evidence-Based Nursing abstracts of systematic reviews.
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Evidence-Based Medicine↗
Biomedical subjects
Stephen R Werre
Publications and source records attributed to Stephen R Werre.
Optimal search strategies for retrieving scientifically strong studies of treatment from Medline: analytical survey.
OBJECTIVE: To develop and test optimal Medline search strategies for retrieving sound clinical studies on prevention or treatment of health disorders. DESIGN: Analytical survey. DATA SOURCES: 161 clinical journals indexed in Medline for the year 2000. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Sensitivity, specificity, precision, and accuracy of 4862 unique terms in 18 404 combinations. RESULTS: Only 1587 (24.2%) of 6568 articles on treatment met criteria for testing clinical interventions. Combinations of search terms reached peak sensitivities of 99.3% (95% confidence interval 98.7% to 99.8%) at a specificity of 70.4% (69.8% to 70.9%). Compared with best single terms, best multiple terms increased sensitivity for sound studies by 4.1% (absolute increase), but with substantial loss of specificity (absolute difference 23.7%) when sensitivity was maximised. When terms were combined to maximise specificity, 97.4% (97.3% to 97.6%) was achieved, about the same as that achieved by the best single term (97.6%, 97.4% to 97.7%). The strategies newly reported in this paper outperformed other validated search strategies except for two strategies that had slightly higher specificity (98.1% and 97.6% v 97.4%) but lower sensitivity (42.0% and 92.8% v 93.1%). CONCLUSION: New empirical search strategies have been validated to optimise retrieval from Medline of articles reporting high quality clinical studies on prevention or treatment of health disorders.
Information Storage and Retrieval↗
Evaluation of kinetics and single-read enzyme-linked immunoassays for detection of Toxoplasma gondii antibodies in sheep.
A kinetics enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and a single-read ELISA for the detection of ovine anti-Toxoplasma gondii IgG were developed and optimized. During the kinetics assay, 3 optical densities were obtained for each serum sample at intervals of 45 seconds, and the results were presented as average slopes (replicates of 2) of the reaction rate between bound enzyme and substrate solution. The kinetics ELISA was stopped 5 minutes after dispensing the substrate to constitute the single-read ELISA, and the results were presented as average optical densities for duplicates of each sample. Performance of the assays was evaluated using the modified agglutination test (MAT) as the "gold standard." There was a high level of agreement between both ELISAs and the MAT, as measured by Pearson correlation coefficients, kappa statistics, and the area under the receiver operating characteristics curves. The single-read ELISA was as accurate as the kinetics ELISA, with a sensitivity of 89% and a specificity of 96%.
Animals↗
Weighted event rates.
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Evidence-Based Medicine↗