"The past decade has witnessed growing interest in genetic predisposition to common diseases, and along with rapid advancements in high-throughput genotyping technology, has resulted in a tremendous amount of published epidemiological evidence on gene-disease associations," says a team of researchers in this week's PLoS Medicine. Julian Higgins (MRC Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom) and colleagues say that with this growth in evidence comes an increasing need to collate and summarize the evidence in order to identify true genetic associations among the large volume of false positives. The preferred approach to summarizing this evidence is to conduct a systematic review—in which researchers try and answer a research question by identifying, selecting, appraising, and synthesizing all high quality research evidence relevant to that question. Higgins and colleagues lay out some key components of the methodology for undertaking such systematic reviews of genetic association studies.
Citation:Sagoo GS, Little J, Higgins JPT(2009) Systematic reviews of genetic association studies.PLoS Med 6(3): e1000028. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000028
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PRESS-ONLY PREVIEW OF THE ARTICLE:http://www.plos.org/press/plme-06-03-higgins.pdf
CONTACT:
Julian Higgins
MRC Biostatistics Unit
Institute of Public Health
Robinson Way
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire CB2 0SR
United Kingdom
+44 1223 330396
julian.higgins@mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk
Journal
PLoS Medicine