While the GRADE framework is used by over 100 health organizations to assess the certainty of evidence and guide the formulation of clinical recommendations, its use in the field of nutrition for these purposes is still sparse. A recent examination of all systematic reviews using GRADE in the ten highest-impact nutrition journals over the past five years provides insight and suggestions for moving the field forward in the use of GRADE for evidence assessment in systematic reviews of nutritional interventions.
Werner and colleagues identified 800 eligible systematic reviews, 55 (6.9%) of which used GRADE, and 47 (5.9%) of which rated the certainty of evidence specific to different outcomes. The number of these reviews using GRADE increased year-to-year, from two in 2015 to 23 in 2019. Reviews claiming to use a modification of GRADE were excluded from analysis.
Of the 811 identified cases of downgrading the certainty of evidence, and 31 cases of upgrading. Reviews of randomized controlled trials had a mean number of 1.6 domains downgraded per outcome, while reviews of non-randomized studies had a mean of 2.1. In about 6.5% of upgrading cases, this was done for unclear purposes not in line with GRADE guidance, such as upgrading for low risk of bias, narrow confidence intervals, or very low p-values. Reviews of non-randomized studies were more likely to have outcomes downgraded for imprecision and inconsistency, and less likely to have downgrades for publication bias than those of randomized studies.
The authors conclude that while the use of GRADE in systematic reviews of nutritional interventions has grown over recent years based on this sample, continued education and training of nutrition researchers and experts can help improve the spread and quality of the application of GRADE to assess the certainty of evidence in this discipline.
Werner SS, Binder N, Toews I, et al. (2021). The use of GRADE in evidence syntheses published in high-impact-factor nutrition journal: A methodological survey. J Clin Epidemiol, in-press.
Manuscript available here.
