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David C. Chang, PhD, MPH, MBA

Arch Surg. 2006;141:1131.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Surgery faces several unique challenges that can make it more difficult than other fields of medicine to conduct rigorous clinical trials. The urgent or emergent nature of many surgical procedures often precludes randomization; sample sizes of surgical patient populations tend to be smaller; and details of the surgical procedure can be highly variable between surgeons or even from the same surgeon at different times. Therefore, instead of large RCTs, we often rely on smaller studies at lower classes of evidence for our clinical practice.

A meta-analysis allows us to address these limitations in our literature. By pooling studies across sites and, more importantly, across time, a meta-analysis allows us to extract and synthesize higher-quality evidence from a limited literature base. Ng et al should be commended for a clear, step-by-step introduction of this valuable research tool to the surgical community.

Over the long run, . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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