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Risk of bias reporting in the recent animal focal cerebral ischaemia literature

Bahor, Z; Liao, J; Macleod, MR; Bannach-Brown, A; McCann, SK; Wever, KE; Thomas, J; ... Sena, E; + view all (2017) Risk of bias reporting in the recent animal focal cerebral ischaemia literature. Clinical Science , 131 (20) pp. 2525-2532. 10.1042/CS20160722. Green open access

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Abstract

BACKGROUND: Findings from in vivo research may be less reliable where studies do not report measures to reduce risks of bias. The experimental stroke community has been at the forefront of implementing changes to improve reporting, but it is not known whether these efforts are associated with continuous improvements. Our aims here were firstly to validate an automated tool to assess risks of bias in published works, and secondly to assess the reporting of measures taken to reduce the risk of bias within recent literature for two experimental models of stroke. METHODS: We developed and used text analytic approaches to automatically ascertain reporting of measures to reduce risk of bias from full-text articles describing animal experiments inducing middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) or modelling lacunar stroke. RESULTS: Compared with previous assessments, there were improvements in the reporting of measures taken to reduce risks of bias in the MCAO literature but not in the lacunar stroke literature. Accuracy of automated annotation of risk of bias in the MCAO literature was 86% (randomization), 94% (blinding) and 100% (sample size calculation); and in the lacunar stroke literature accuracy was 67% (randomization), 91% (blinding) and 96% (sample size calculation). DISCUSSION: There remains substantial opportunity for improvement in the reporting of animal research modelling stroke, particularly in the lacunar stroke literature. Further, automated tools perform sufficiently well to identify whether studies report blinded assessment of outcome, but improvements are required in the tools to ascertain whether randomization and a sample size calculation were reported.

Type: Article
Title: Risk of bias reporting in the recent animal focal cerebral ischaemia literature
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1042/CS20160722
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1042/CS20160722
Language: English
Additional information: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open access article published by Portland Press Limited on behalf of the Biochemical Society and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY).
Keywords: animal models, lacunar, middle cerebral artery occlusion, research improvement, risks of bias, text mining, Animals, Bias, Brain Ischemia, Disease Models, Animal, Humans, Infarction, Middle Cerebral Artery, Risk, Stroke
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10039988
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