Evidence-based medicine is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence-based medicine means to integrate individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research. So evidence and its quality is the key issue of evidence-based medicine. The purpose of this article is to introduce to the healthcare professionals the sources of evidence and how to search for evidence for them.
Evidence has been retrieved through MEDLINE and Cochrane Libray about the treatment for patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease who suffered from on-off, dyskinesia and depression after chronic use of L-dopa. All of the evidence has been evaluated. Methods of evidence-based treatment were drawn up according to the evidence, clinciams’ experiences and patients’ preferences. All symptoms of the patient have been improved obviously.
In 2014, the new concept of embolic stroke of undetermined source (ESUS) was first proposed by cryptogenic stroke/ESUS International Working Group. In the past 5 years, related clinical researches of ESUS have been deepened, and the results of many large clinical studies have been published. However, the guiding significance of this new concept to clinical practice is still controversial. By reviewing the background, diagnostic criteria, assessment, common emboli sources, anticoagulant therapy research advances and related limitations of ESUS, and analyzing the possible causes of negative anticoagulant therapy results, we explored the clinical value of this new classification.
ObjectiveTo systematically review the association between migraine and lacunar infarcts on MR image.MethodsPubMed, EMbase, The Cochrane Library, CNKI, VIP and WanFang Data databases were electronically searched to collect randomized controlled trials, cohort studies and cross-sectional studies on the association between migraine and lacunar infarcts from inception to March 2019. Two reviewers independently screened literature, extracted data and assessed the risk of bias of included studies, then, meta-analysis was performed by RevMan 5.3 software.ResultsA total of 5 studies involving 5 104 participants were included. The results of meta-analysis showed that: there were no significant associations of migraine (OR=0.93, 95%CI 0.78 to 1.12, P=0.470) and aura (OR=1.10, 95%CI 0.89 to 1.36, P=0.390) with lacunar infarcts on MR image. Subgroup analysis by age, presence or absence of aura showed no significant tendency.ConclusionsThere is no significant relationship between migraine and lacunar infarcts. Due to limited quality and quantity of the included studies, more high quality studies are required to verify above conclusions.
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for the design of clinical trials. Because of some practical difficulties, more and more researchers think that the appropriate use of non-randomized controlled trials may make up for the weakness of RCT and will achieve the same research purpose. Therefore, non-RCTs are also very important. Taking studies on multiple sclerosis for example, this article briefly introduces the significance of non-randomized contolled trials.