Thus, the recommendations of a DMC can influence the conclusion and interpretation of trial results and, indirectly, their implementation in clinical practice.
The rationales in this program are defined as explanations of the reasons underlying one's decisions, conclusions, and interpretations.
"The conclusions and interpretations they make are often not the ones professional geneticists, biological anthropologists, and historians would make, but these interpretations are not ignorant or uneducated".
Lastly, subgroup analyses and meta-regression are, by disposition, exploratory tools to provide pointers towards possible sources of heterogeneity - they cannot be taken as confirmatory tests for definitive conclusions and interpretations about the causes of heterogeneity.
This is an interesting and worthwhile paper that addresses an important subject, although I find a number of the conclusions and interpretations to be too sweeping for my comfort.
The following characteristics of the reviews were extracted: illness or disease type, self-monitoring activity (i.e. awareness/interpretation/response), type of review, search strategy, inclusion and exclusion criteria, quality assessment, data extraction procedure, total number of studies and participants, author's conclusions and interpretations.
However, it should be emphasized that the numbers presented in this work are estimates and cannot be precise, in that they are influenced by a number of different factors such as quality of the research done, conclusions and interpretations by authors (of the articles in the database), and by the subjective approach of the collector and interpreters of the published results.
Responsibility for opinions, conclusions, and interpretation of data lies with the authors.
