What are the quality elements listed in Table 2 of the Chronic Heart Failure Methods 2018 NICE guidelines?
The quality elements listed in Table 2 of the Chronic Heart Failure Methods 2018 NICE guidelines are: Risk of bias, Indirectness, Inconsistency, Imprecision, and Publication bias. Risk of bias refers to any limitations in the study design and implementation that may bias the results of the treatment effect. Indirectness refers to the differences in study population, intervention, comparator, and outcomes between the available evidence and the review question. Inconsistency refers to an unexplained heterogeneity of effect estimates between studies in the same meta-analysis. Imprecision refers to results that are imprecise when studies include relatively few patients and few events, and thus have wide confidence intervals around the estimate of the effect relative to clinically important thresholds. Lastly, Publication bias is a systematic underestimate or overestimate of the underlying beneficial or harmful effect due to the selective publication of studies.