What was the quality of the clinical evidence regarding IV iron versus placebo?
For mortality, the evidence was rated very low quality due to risk of bias and imprecision. In addition to this the evidence for all-cause hospitalisation was graded as low quality for the same reasons. However, the committee noted that the confidence intervals around the absolute effect were reasonably narrow for this outcome, suggesting that the committee could have greater confidence in the result. Another study reported heart failure related hospitalisations (rather than all-cause); this outcome was downgraded for indirectness as the outcome may not have captured all of the potential hospitalisations relating to the intervention.