Evidence-Based Surgery: A Guide to Understanding and Interpreting the Surgical Literature

Description:

The purpose of this book specifically is to teach surgeons (academic or community), surgical fellows and surgical residents regardless of the surgical specialty, the skills to appraise what they read in the surgical literature.  Surgeons need to be able to understand what they read before applying the conclusions of a surgical article to their practice.  As most surgeons do not have the extra training in health research methodology, understanding how the research was done, how to interpret the results and finally deciding to apply them to the patient level is indeed a difficult task.   Chapters explain the methodological issues pertaining to the various study designs reported in the surgical literature.  Most chapters begin with a clinical scenario with uncertain course of action with which most surgeons are struggling.  Readers are taught how to search the literature for the best evidence that will answer the surgical problem under discussion. An identified article that seems relevant to the problem you are investigating can be appraised by addressing 3 key questions: 1). Is the study I am reading valid? 2). What are the results of this study? 3). Can I apply these results to my patients?   While the primary goal of Evidence-Based Surgery is to teach surgeons how to appraise the surgical literature, an added benefit is that the concepts explained here may help research-minded surgeons produce higher quality research.

Table of Contents:

1. History of Evidence-Based Surgery (EBS)

2. The Steps of Practicing Evidence-Based Surgery (EBS)

3. Developing a Surgical Clinical Research Question: To Find the Answer in Literature Search or in Pursuing Clinical Research

4. Finding the Evidence Through Searching the Literature

5. Hierarchy of Evidence in Surgical Research

6. Evaluating Surgical Interventions

7. A Primer on Outcome Measures for Surgical Interventions

8. Patient-Important Outcome Measures in Surgical Care

9. Surrogate Endpoints

10. How to Assess an Article that Deals with Health-Related Quality of Life

11. Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing Surgical Interventions

12. How to Assess a Pilot Trial in Surgery

13. Non-inferiority Randomized Controlled Trials

14. Expertise-Based Randomized Controlled Trials

15. The Surgeon’s Guide to Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

16. Prospective and Retrospective Cohort Studies

17. Case-Control Studies

18. Evaluating Case Series in Surgery

19. Quality Improvement and Patient Safety in Surgery

20. Diagnostic Studies in Surgery

21. How to Assess a Prognostic Study

22. Decision Analysis and Surgery

23. Economic Evaluations in Surgery

24. Studies Reporting Harm in Surgery

25. Evaluating Surveys and Questionnaires in Surgical Research

26. Opinion Pieces in Surgery

27. Simple Statistical Tests and P Values

28. Confidence Intervals

29. Power and Sample Size

30. Subgroup Analyses in Surgery

31. Introduction to Clinical Practice Guidelines

Back Matter