Artikel
Methodological quality and editorial independence of supranational guidelines for chronic diseases in comparison to national guidelines: progress or regress?
Suche in Medline nach
Autoren
Veröffentlicht: | 10. Juli 2012 |
---|
Gliederung
Text
Background: Guidelines published by supranational scientific societies are available for many diseases and can spare resources of national guideline authors.
Objectives: We sought to examine the methodological quality and editorial independence of supranational guidelines (SG) in comparison to national guidelines (NG).
Methods: We analysed the results of guideline quality appraisals which are part of evidence reports for German national disease management (NDM) programs and NDM guidelines. Assessment was done with the German Instrument for Methodological Guideline Appraisal (DELBI) which is based in AGREE or with the AGREE-Instrument by two reviewers independently. We compared means and maximum values of the domain scores on rigor of development and editorial independence of SG with scores of NG.
Results: Results of guideline appraisals for 12 evidence reports containing 207 guidelines were included. In 7 reports searches for guidelines were done between 2006 and 2007 and in 5 reports between 2010 and 2011. National guidelines included were mostly from US (37%), Germany (18%), Canada (15%) and Great Britain (11%). For rigor of development there was no tendency in favour or against SG according to means whereas according to maximum values SG was rated lower in 11 of 12 cases. The same pattern was evident for editorial independence.
Discussion: Our results indicate that SG when compared with high quality NG are often of inferior quality.
Implications for guideline developers/users: The methodological quality of SG should be further improved in order to allow national users to adapt them.