Study methods: design (eg, parallel design), randomisation method, method of allocation concealment, incomplete data, blinding, selective reporting and other sources of bias.
There are many ways to achieve adequate blinding in animal studies, such as having coded data (blinding to treatment assignment) analyzed by a statistician who is independent of the rest of the research team.
The extraction form consists of 10 major items: general information (author, working location, publication date, journal, etc), the participants, characteristics of interventions, outcomes, randomisation, allocation concealment, incomplete data, blinding, selective report, and conflicts of interest.
However, the quality of the evidence was low for clinical outcomes as there was evidence of significant heterogeneity in the effect size, study level biases including issues with randomisation, incomplete outcome data, blinding, as well as risk of publication bias [ 33].
11 Therefore, the EPOC tool uses the same approach as the general Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool, but requires an assessment of bias in nine domains: sequence generation, allocation concealment, similarity of baseline measurements, similarity of baseline characteristics, incomplete data, blinding of outcome assessment, contamination, selective outcome reporting and others.
By failing to solicit human responses in the pursuit of information, I believe we are making a big mistake – in relying excessively on this single source, we open ourselves up to a data blind spot.
Two programs may be covering the same territory but each could have the other in a data blind spot.
Two independent operators performed analysis of data blinded to experimental group.
Again we used 5 mice per group (n = 5), and analysed the data blinded to the treatment group.
Allocation will be concealed, and study data blinded, for the bio-statisticians and researchers who will perform the analyses.
Practices cannot be blinded to their treatment allocation, but the statistical team was blinded to this allocation and will analyse the data blind.
