ICUD - EBM Paper
Evidence – based medicine overview of the main steps for developing and grading guideline recommendation.
INTRODUCTION
The International Consultation on Urological Diseases (ICUD) is a non-governmental organization registered with the World Health Organisation (WHO). In the last ten years Consultations have been organised on BPH, Prostate Cancer, Urinary Stone Disease, Nosocomial Infections, Erectile Dysfunction and Urinary Incontinence. These consultations have looked at published evidence and produced recommendations at four levels; highly recommended, recommended, optional and not recommended. This method has been useful but the ICUD believes that there should be more explicit statements of the levels of evidence that generate the subsequent grades of recommendations.
The Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) have used specified evidence levels to justify recommendations for the investigation and treatment of a variety of conditions. The Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine have produced a widely accepted adaptation of the work of AHCPR.
The ICUD has examined the Oxford guidelines and discussed with the Oxford group their applicability to the Consultations organised by ICUD. It is highly desirable that the recommendations made by the Consultations follow an accepted grading system supported by explicit levels of evidence.
The ICUD proposes that future consultations should use a modified version of the Oxford system which can be directly "mapped" onto the Oxford system.
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Peer Review Article
The final published version of the article has been published in Neurourology and Urodynamics as follows:
International consultation on urological diseases: Evidence-based medicine overview of the main steps for developing and grading guideline recommendations
Paul Abrams, Saad Khoury
Neurourology and Urodynamics
Volume 29, Issue 1, Pages 116 - 118,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/nau.20845
Copyright © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
