While it is important for the evidence supporting practice guidelines to be current, that is often not the case. The advent of living systematic reviews has made the concept of "living guidelines" realistic, with the promise to provide timely, up-to-date and high-quality guidance to target users. We define living guidelines as an optimization of the guideline development process to allow updating individual recommendations as soon as new relevant evidence becomes available. A major implication of that definition is that the unit of update is the individual recommendation and not the whole guideline. We then discuss when living guidelines are appropriate, the workflows required to support them, the collaboration between living systematic reviews and living guideline teams, the thresholds for changing recommendations, and potential approaches to publication and dissemination. The success and sustainability of the concept of living guideline will depend on those of its major pillar, the living systematic review. We conclude that guideline developers should both experiment with and research the process of living guidelines.
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an illness resulting from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that emerged in late 2019. Patients with cancer, and especially those with hematologic malignancies, may be at especially high risk of adverse outcomes, including mortality resulting from COVID-19 infection. The ASH Research Collaborative COVID-19 Registry for Hematology was developed to study features and outcomes of COVID-19 infection in patients with underlying blood disorders, such as hematologic malignancies. At the time of this report, data from 250 patients with blood cancers from 74 sites around the world had been entered into the registry. The most commonly represented malignancies were acute leukemia (33%), non-Hodgkin lymphoma (27%), and myeloma or amyloidosis (16%). Patients presented with a myriad of symptoms, most frequently fever (73%), cough (67%), dyspnea (50%), and fatigue (40%). Use of COVID-19–directed therapies, such as hydroxychloroquine (n = 76) or azithromycin (n = 59), was common. Overall mortality was 28%. Patients with a physician-estimated prognosis from the underlying hematologic malignancy of <12 months at the time of COVID-19 diagnosis and those with relapsed/refractory disease experienced a higher proportion of moderate/severe COVID-19 disease and death. In some instances, death occurred after a decision was made to forgo intensive care unit admission in favor of a palliative approach. Taken together, these data support the emerging consensus that patients with hematologic malignancies experience significant morbidity and mortality resulting from COVID-19 infection. Batch submissions from sites with high incidence of COVID-19 infection are planned to support future analyses.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.