The Levels of Evidence and their role in Evidence-Based Medicine
By P. Burns, Rod J. Rohrich, K. Chung. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, 2011
1,873 citations recorded by the source corpus.
As the name suggests, evidence-based medicine (EBM), is about finding evidence and using that evidence to make clinical decisions. A cornerstone of EBM is the hierarchical system of classifying evidence. This hierarchy is known as the levels of evidence. Physicians are encouraged to find the highest level of evidence to answer clinical questions. Several papers published in Plastic Surgery journals concerning EBM topics have touched on this subject.1–6 Specifically, previous papers have discussed the lack of higher level evidence in PRS and need to improve the evidence published in the journal. Before that can be accomplished, it is important to understand the history behind the levels and how they should be interpreted. This paper will focus on the origin of levels of evidence, their relevance to the EBM movement and the implications for the field of plastic surgery as well as the everyday practice of plastic surgery.
Subfields: Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Statistics and Probability
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a265d2dbddcd8f210e29105428af45d9340a25c
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Citations in the corpus
- MEDITRON-70B: Scaling Medical Pretraining for Large Language Models (2023, background): “As a super-synthesis of meta-analyses, they sit atop the ‘evidence pyramid’ and form the basis of actionable evidence-based practice (Burns et al., 2011).”
- Guidance on Conducting and REporting DElphi Studies (CREDES) in palliative care: Recommendations based on a methodological systematic review (2017, background): “In comparison, expert consensus is regarded as the lowest grade of evidence.(3) However, in palliative care research, Page 5 of 39”
- Dose–Response Relationships of Resistance Training in Healthy Old Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (2015, background): “However, a careful examination of this position stand suggests that the position stand was based on category 4 or ‘expert level’ evidence on the evidence pyramid, the lowest compared with evidence level 1 provided by systematic reviews and meta-analyses [11].”
- Metabolic Surgery in the Treatment Algorithm for Type 2 Diabetes: A Joint Statement by International Diabetes Organizations (2016, methodology): “of Evidence Criteria used for evidence searching were based on methods used in previous consensus development conferences and systematic reviews of evidence (44,45), adapted to serve the DSS-II objectives.”