It would be misleading to liken the data obtained from the nonrandomized studies to transfusion strategies.
The decrease of the positive predictive value for AIDS/HIV from 100% in 1999 to 66.7% in 2003 could mislead quality of care studies focusing on this co-morbidity, as might occur if one wanted to study anti-HIV virus drug utilization, for example.
Other factors which could have led to misleading study results include selection of study areas, ascertainment of cases, population selected for the denominator, migration, classification of exposure and blinding of investigators to the fluoridation status of cases.
In its absence, overall task-specific information may be misleading in studying human vision in that participants can zero in on the most diagnostic subfragment(s) of a given fragment and disregard the rest.
34 35 Similarly, the prevalence of multimorbidity gives us a static picture of the population; however, prevalence may be misleading when studying the mechanisms of multimorbidity.
Funnel plot-based tests used to detect publication bias in review of randomized controlled trials have proven to be seriously misleading for diagnostic studies, and alternatives have poor power [ 40].
Our results, however, are not exempt from limitations, mainly related to the high complexity involved in the evaluation of the performance of diagnostic tests and the possibility of misleading published studies which are not available through Medline searches, in addition to the heterogeneity of design across studies.
Deliberately misleading copy-cat study from an ALEC scholar?
With the increasing number of publications available, and opportunity costs from decisions based on misleading study findings, transparency and clarity in reporting are important.
