Immunosuppressive therapy is vital for the success of a kidney transplant, yet it entails potential risks and side effects. The challenge lies in finding the right balance between suppressing the immune response enough to prevent rejection while minimizing the risk of infections, organ toxicity, and other complications associated with long-term…

Existing systems for automating the assessment of risk-of-bias (RoB) in medical studies are supervised approaches that require substantial training data to work well. However, recent revisions to RoB guidelines have resulted in a scarcity of available training data. In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of generative large language…

Population-adjusted indirect comparisons, developed in the 2010s, enable comparisons between two treatments in different studies by balancing patient characteristics in the case where individual patient-level data (IPD) are available for only one study. Health technology assessment (HTA) bodies increasingly rely on these methods to inform funding…

Some patients benefit from a treatment while others may do so less or do not benefit at all. We have previously developed a two-stage network meta-regression prediction model that synthesized randomized trials and evaluates how treatment effects vary across patient characteristics. In this article, we extended this model to combine different…

Systematic reviewers are advised to search trials registers to minimise risk of reporting biases. However, there has been little research on the impact of searching trials registers on the results of meta-analyses. We aimed to evaluate the impact of searching clinical trials registers for systematic reviews of pharmaceutical or non-pharmaceutical…

A substantial proportion of trial registrations are not linked to corresponding published articles, limiting analyses and new tools. Our aim was to develop a method for finding articles reporting the results of trials that are registered on ClinicalTrials.gov when they do not include metadata links. We used a set of 27,280 trial registration and…

Background: Involving adults with cognitive impairments, and specifically intellectual disability, in research is critical to developing appropriate and effective interventions but is highly challenging. Our aim was to examine where complexities lie in delivering research in underrepresented and hard to reach populations using an exemplar process…

Objective: We offer an overview of ADHD research using mouse models of nicotine exposure. Method: Nicotine exposure of C57BL/6 or Swiss Webster mice occurred during prenatal period only or during the prenatal and the preweaning periods. Behavioral, neuroanatomical and neurotransmitter assays were used to investigate neurobiological mechanisms of…

Physically active learning is considered to enhance learning and additionally addresses health goals like increasing activity levels and reducing obesity. However, physically active learning has rarely been applied to science and engineering learning, or utilized with younger learners (e.g under sevens). This article describes a physically active…

Hundreds of clinical trials of potential treatments and vaccines for the "coronavirus 19 disease" (COVID-19) have been set up in record time. This is a remarkable reaction to the global pandemic, but the absence of a global coordination of clinical research efforts raises serious ethical concerns. Some COVID-19 patients might carry the…

During drug development, a biomarker is sometimes identified as separating a patient population into those with more and those with less benefit from evaluated treatments. Consequently, later studies might be targeted, while earlier ones are performed in mixed patient populations. This poses a challenge in evidence synthesis, especially if only…

Collaboration between industry and universities is a driving force for scientific and technological advancements. Due to the role of AstraZeneca (AZ), a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic, an analysis of the collaboration between the company and universities in the UK is of…

Meta-analysis of 2 × 2 tables is common and useful in research topics including analysis of adverse events and survey research data. Fixed-effects inference typically centers on measures of association such as the Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel statistic or Woolf's estimator, but relies on assuming exact homogeneity across studies, which is often…

The aim of this study is to profile academic institutions (n = 127) based on publications, citations in the top 10% of journals, patent citations in Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approvals, clinical trials with uploaded results, contributions to clinical practice guidelines, awarded patents, start-ups, and licenses generating income in…

The practice of prospectively registering the details of intervention studies in a public database or registry is gaining momentum across disciplines as a strategy for increasing the transparency, credibility, and accessibility of study findings. In this article, we consider five registries that may be relevant for registration of intervention…