Objectives. To summarize the quantity and quality of evidence for using Tripterygium wilfordii Hook. f. (TwHF) preparations in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and to find the reasons of the disparity by comprehensively appraising the related systematic reviews (SRs). Methods. We performed an overview of evidence for the effectiveness and safety of TwHF preparations for patients with RA. We searched seven literature databases from inception to July 15, 2021. We included SRs of TwHF preparations in the treatment of RA. Four tools were used to evaluate the reporting quality, methodological quality, risk of bias, and the certainty of evidence for the included SRs, which are the PRISMA, the AMSTAR-2, the ROBIS, and the GRADE approach. Results. We included 27 SRs (with 385 studies and 33,888 participants) for this overview. The AMSTAR-2 showed that 19 SRs had critically low methodological quality and the remaining 8 had low methodological quality. The rate of overlaps was 68.31% (263/385), and the CCA (corrected covered area) was 0.53, which indicated the degree of overlap is slight. Based on the assessment of ROBIS, all 27 SRs were rated as low risk in phase 1; one SR was rated as low risk in domain 1, 9 SRs were in low risk in domain 2, 16 SRs were in low risk in domain 3, and 16 SRs were in low risk in domain 4 in phase 2; 7 SRs were rated as low risk in phase 3. Among 27 items of PRISMA, 15 items were reported over 70% of compliance, the reporting quality of 16 SRs was rated as “fair,” and 11 were “good.” Using GRADE assessment, moderate quality of evidence was found in 5 outcomes, and 5 outcomes were low quality. Conclusion. The use of TwHF preparations for the treatment of RA may be clinically effective according to the moderate-quality evidence. There are methodological issues, risk of bias, and reporting deficiencies still needed to be improved. SRs with good quality and further randomized clinical trials that focus on clinical important outcomes are needed.

ObjectiveMulticriteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a useful tool in complex decision-making situations, and has been used in medical fields to evaluate treatment options and drug selection. This study aims to provide valuable insights into MCDA in healthcare through examining the research focus of existing studies, major fields, major applications, most productive authors and countries, and most common journals in the domain.MethodsA bibliometric analysis was conducted on the publication related to MCDA in healthcare from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database on 14 July 2021. Three bibliometric software (VOSviewer, R-bibliometrix, and CiteSpace) were used to conduct the analysis including years, countries, institutes, authors, journals, co-citation references, and keywords.ResultsA total of 410 publications were identified with an average yearly growth rate of 32% (1999–2021), from 196 academic journals with 23,637 co-citation references by 871 institutions from 70 countries/regions. The United States was the most productive country (n = 80). Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (n = 16), Université de Montréal (n = 13), and Syreon Research Institute (n = 12) were the top productive institutions. A A Zaidan, Mireille Goetghebeur and Zoltan Kalo were the biggest nodes in every cluster of authors' networks. The top journals in terms of the number of articles (n = 17) and citations (n = 1,673) were Value in Health and Journal of Medical Systems, respectively. The extant literature has focused on four aspects, including the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), decision-making, health technology assessment, and healthcare waste management. COVID-19 and fuzzy TOPSIS received careful attention from MCDA applications recently. MCDA in big data, telemedicine, TOPSIS, and fuzzy AHP is well-developed and an important theme, which may be the trend in future research.ConclusionThis study uncovers a holistic picture of the performance of MCDA-related literature published in healthcare. MCDA has a broad application on different topics and would be helpful for practitioners, researchers, and decision-makers working in healthcare to advance the wheel of medical complex decision-making. It can be argued that the door is still open for improving the role of MCDA in healthcare, whether in its methodology (e.g., fuzzy TOPSIS) or application (e.g., telemedicine).

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