gms | German Medical Science

Backgroud: In Japan, the official movement to develop Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) began in 1999 with the financial support of the Ministry of Health and Welfare (presently, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare). Since then, CPG in various fileds, have been developed, and development methods using the principles of evidence-based medicine are becoming popular. Now about 100 well-formulated CPGs are developed already.

Purpose: The objective of the study is to clarify how many CPGs developed in Japan, and to evaluate those CPGs. Then, we have turn around the history of CPG development.

Methods: We have searched the existing CPGs comprehensively. Out of the 400 searched CPGs, well-formulated ones were selected if they met the following criteria: defining clinical questions to be addressed, reviewing evidence, determining grade of recommendation, and becomming open to the public. We have compared the developing methods, grade of recommendation, public involvement, economic analysis, comflict of interest, style of the products, revision, and distribution.

Result: 97 of them are well-formulated, and all most of them they have searched only 2 or 3 databases. Each CPG cited about 600 references that included 150 Japanese literatures. Over 90% of them are published by commercial company. One fourth of them are supported by the fund from the Ministry of Health Labour and Welfare.

Conclusion: Though the well-formulated CPGs increased to twice its amount in this five years, this study revealed there are few Japanese CPGs that include relevant information to support communications among patient, carer and physicians.