Review Interventions for the management of long covid post-covid condition: living systematic review, 2024, Zeraatkar, Flottorp, Garner, Busse+

No don't think so but it took a while before it was up on the BMJ website. Maybe there is now also a delay because of the holidays?

 

Yeah, the submission took a while for me. And they don't give confirmation, except the green message. Hopefully they add it after Christmas.

 

I've only just seen this thread and haven't read all the comments so apologies if this duplicates, but I was about to start going through some Cochrane reading material.

My first question was also what the hell is a Living systematic review??

Reading the following from Cochrane, isn't this exactly what Cochrane have just done to the Larun et al 2019 review on ME/CFS? @Trish @Peter Trewhitt

Living systematic reviews | Cochrane Community

 

My understanding is that a ‘living review’ is developed for use in a rapidly changing field such as Covid during the pandemic, where provisional guidelines are produced and subject to continuous updating when new data becomes available. But I may be misunderstanding this.

However I would argue that Larun et al is the reverse of this, a dead review, albeit on life support via Cochrane’s editorial board. Larun et al is not being continuously updated on the basis of new evidence, the most recent data used was published in 2011, it is fighting tooth and nail any acknowledgment of already established contrary evidence and interpretations.

 

Thanks for that clarification. I'll carry on reading then.

 

More like cryopreservation.

 

Or like leaving a rotting corpse on a slab in public.

 

More than a month later and there is still no peer review or reply from the authors to the comments made.

 

I posted this blog today, which mentions the lack of reply to the rapid responses, among other things.

 

The authors have published a rapid response yesterday:
https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-081318/rapid-responses

Very disappointing and ignores the point about imprecision.

 

Also noteworthy is that the peer review documentation is still not available, https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-081318/peer-review

 

I hope someone will write another response given that this would appear to be a major point of contention. Perhaps it will be sensible to point someone like Nuno Sepulveda to the issues around imprecision.

 

The LISTEN trial, a generic rehabilitation trial for LC, has published its results. It's a bust, but they still claim success, ask for more research and implementation in clinical practice. As is tradition.

It meets the criteria for this review. Let's see how 'alive' it is.

https://www.s4me.info/threads/effec...ng-covid-listen-trial-2025-jones-et-al.42450/

 

Protocol published yesterday in BMJ Open:

Link | PDF | Reviewer comments

Haven't looked at it in detail but a couple of minor points:

(a) It doesn't look like the exclusion in the review of anosmia/hyposmia related LC trials was specified in the protocol?

(b) The protocol says "reviewers will use the TRACT checklist. . . and perform sensitivity analyses excluding trials that are deemed suspicious" - they did use the checklist but I can't see mention of the sensitivity analyses for this in the review (this was probably due to the limited number of trials, but equally 25% of trials were flagged using TRACT for integrity concerns).

 

your response is excellent, as usual.

 

Their response is also non-responsive to the point I had raised, which was that they didn't point out in key sections that the REGAIN sample were post-hospitalized patients. REGAIN itself was forced to append a correction--not because they didn't mention that at all but because it wasn't mentioned in the most prominent places. This review did the exact same thing. The response is the same as the initial REGAIN response--"we mentioned the limitations in the fine print." But in the case of REGAIN, the BMJ itself apparently overruled the authors, because while they claimed in a rapid response that there was no correction needed, a correction appeared the next month.

Here again, they're responding to a criticism I didn't make. I didn't say they never mentioned anywhere that this was a hospitalized group. I pointed out that that needed to be mentioned in the prominent places like the abstract.