Ev­i­dence Re­view

The Stan­dards of Care sub­com­mit­tee for each sec­tion cre­ates an ini­tial list of rel­e­vant clin­i­cal ques­tions that is re­viewed and dis­cussed by the ex­pert pan­el. In con­sul­ta­tion with a sys­tem­at­ic re­view ex­pert, each sub­com­mit­tee de­vis­es and ex­e­cutes sys­tem­at­ic lit­er­a­ture search­es. For the 2023 Stan­dards of Care, PubMed, Med­line, and EM­BASE were searched for the time pe­ri­ods of 1 June 2021 to 26 July 2022. Search­es are lim­it­ed to stud­ies pub­lished in En­glish. Sub­com­mit­tee mem­bers also man­u­al­ly search jour­nals, ref­er­ence lists of con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings, and reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cy web­sites. All po­ten­tial­ly rel­e­vant ci­ta­tions are then sub­ject­ed to a full-​text re­view. In con­sul­ta­tion with the method­ol­o­gist, the sub­com­mit­tees pre­pare the ev­i­dence sum­maries and grad­ing for each sec­tion of the Stan­dards of Care. All PPC mem­bers dis­cuss and re­view the ev­i­dence sum­maries and make re­vi­sions as ap­pro­pri­ate. The final ev­i­dence sum­maries are then de­lib­er­at­ed on by the PPC, and the rec­om­men­da­tions that will ap­pear in the Stan­dards of Care are draft­ed.