The following is the Supplementary data to this article. Supplementary Data “
“Epidemiological research plays a critical role in assessing the effects of various chemical, physical, biological, radiological, and behavior-related exposures on human selleck chemical health. However, even well-designed and rigorously implemented epidemiological studies that are specifically designed to test causal hypotheses in humans often report conflicting results. Regulatory bodies and consensus panels charged with recommending health policy typically rely on weight-of-evidence (WOE) approaches for evaluating epidemiological
research findings. A WOE assessment may be incomplete or misleading if it does not evaluate study quality to ensure that the conclusions are based on the strongest evidence available. In addition, study quality assessments during peer reviews of grant proposals and manuscripts
serve to enhance the overall quality of human exposure and health research. While determination of study quality will always to some extent involve professional judgment, there appears to be an emerging consensus that any evaluation of the strength Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitor Library high throughput of epidemiological evidence should rely on agreed-upon criteria that are applied systematically (Vandenbroucke et al., 2007). These considerations motivated the development and refinement selleck inhibitor of several study quality assessment tools. Some of these tools (e.g., STROBE (Vandenbroucke et al., 2007); CONSORT (Moher et al., 2001)) address general issues that apply across disciplines. Other tools were developed specifically for various areas of medicine or life sciences (e.g., STREGA for genetic studies (Little et al., 2009), GRADE for comparative treatment effectiveness research (Owens et al., 2010), and STARD for studies of diagnostic accuracy (Bossuyt et al., 2004)). In view of the current tendency toward standardization
of WOE assessment that incorporates study quality, the relative paucity of instruments for evaluating environmental epidemiology studies – either during development of study design or in review of manuscripts – is notable and difficult to explain. An evaluative scheme focusing on assessing study quality for weight of evidence assessments (Harmonization of Neurodevelopmental Environmental Epidemiology Studies) (Youngstrom et al., 2011) used the Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies (QUADAS) as the basis for a coding tool (Whiting et al., 2003), but as the name implies, this instrument centered on neurodevelopmental studies. The National Toxicology Program recently developed an approach for assessing study quality (NTP, 2013) and used this to examine the literature on environmental chemicals and diabetes (Kuo et al.
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