Systematic review and meta-analysis in palliative medicine

A systematic review is a rigorous and reproducible synthesis of the results of all existing original studies answering the same research question. A meta-analysis is the statistical summary of the studies included in the systematic review. The purpose of this article is to highlight the interest of knowing this method for the synthesis of systematic review of intervention studies and to provide a guide for the critical appraisal and the development of a review protocol. Most of the available tools have been developed as part of the work of the Cochrane Collaboration. After a brief history of the progress made to improve the reliability of method, its interest in palliative care is illustrated with a Cochrane review evaluating the benefit of palliative sedation in terminally-ill adults. New perspectives offered by qualitative synthesis of other types of studies may be of high interest for research in palliative care. (C) 2015 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.