Twenty years of Cochrane reviews in menstrual disorders and subfertility

Abstract

The past three decades have seen considerable change in the understanding of clinical research methods. There has been an acceptance that RCTs are the best way of establishing treatment effectiveness and a recognition that, while single studies are useful, pooling knowledge from a complete body of work is likely to provide the best evidence. Advances in methodology have been mirrored by the many advances in the field of reproductive medicine, such as assisted reproduction, assessment of male fertility, ovulation induction and laparoscopic surgery. Together, they have led to welcome improvements in the outcomes of fertility treatments. In particular, systematic reviews have become important tools enabling clinicians and patients to make health-care decisions based on evidence from all the available high-quality studies. The move towards identifying and aggregating the highest quality evidence has been led by the Cochrane Collaboration, which this year celebrates 20 years of preparing and publishing systematic reviews. This paper outlines the achievements, progress and challenges of this enterprise to date, with a particular focus on systematic reviews of reproductive medicine.

The attitudes of infertile couples towards assisted reproductive techniques in Yazd, Iran: A cross sectional study in 2014

“…In recent years, considerable success has been achieved in the field of assisted reproductive modern technology, while making decisions about it is affected by the people's perceptions and expectations as well as attitudes toward the use of these technologies. A lot of systematic reviews covering ART have been published ( 8 , 9 ).…”

Evidence-based research and practice: attitudes of reproduction nurses, counsellors and doctors

“…there are strong indications that fertility practice has transformed from 'cookery-based' ( Vandekerckhove et al, 1993) to evidence-based practice (Johnson et al, 2003), with the Cochrane Menstrual Disorders and Subfertility Group being the fourth largest Cochrane review group in terms of published systematic reviews. The translation of research findings to clinical practice remains challenging; however, examples to changes in fertility practice have been recommended in clinical guidelines and position statement, as highlighted by Farquhar et al (2013), which provided some evidence of changes to practice, including reducing adverse outcomes from preimplantation genetic screening, the number of embryos transferred in IVF treatment and the surgical removal of hydrosalpinges prior to IVF as some of the techniques to improve pregnancy outcomes.…”

“…Much of this clinical research has been synthesized in systematic reviews. Over 50 Cochrane systematic reviews covering all stages of assisted reproduction technology (Farquhar et al, 2013) and 34 other reviews covering fertility interventions such as ovulation induction and intrauterine insemination (Brown et al, 2012) have been published. The development of evidence-based research and practice impacts on the health provider, yet relatively little attention has been paid to examining knowledge and attitudes to research among reproduction healthcare professionals.…”

Bibliometric and thematic analysis of articles in the field of infertility (2011-2015)

“…One of the suitable tools to study the process of research in specialized areas is to focus on research and scientific articles. In the area of infertility, numerous studies have been conducted and there are many scientific productions in this sphere ( 7 - 9 ). There are analytical instruments in this area used to assess the studies one of which is co-occurrence word analysis.…”