Assess the risk of bias (RoB) of systematic reviews (SRs) and to summarize available evidence of HA in treating knee OA

Intra-articular hyaluronic acid injection in treating knee osteoarthritis: assessing risk of bias in systematic reviews with ROBIS tool.

Article specifications

This review study was published in 2017 in Journal of Int J Rheum Dis. (IF 2014:4.67) by Chinese specialists. The purpose of the present study was to assess the risk of bias (RoB) of systematic reviews (SRs) and to summarize available evidence of HA in treating knee OA. A systematic search of SRs published through to December 2016 was conducted using the MEDLINE, EMBASE and Cochrane Library. The RoB of included SRs was assessed by ROBIS tool. Thirty-one SRs were eligible for inclusion. According to the ROBIS tool, there were 13 SRs with low RoB, 16 with high RoB and two with unclear RoB.

 

Result

This study evaluated RoB in SRs for managing knee OA with HA and assessed the evidence quality of each primary outcome in SRs with low RoB. These results can help users of SRs to improve the process of SR assessment in developing overviews or guidelines, leading to more reliable recommendations for improvements in treating knee OA.