The I in PICO describes the intervention in a review or study which includes, treatments, adjunctive therapies, medications, diagnostic tests or recommendations for patients. The C in PICO describes the comparison in a review or study which is the alternative or standard treatment to be compared to the experimental intervention. Most of the principles for annotating Comparisons are the same as those for Interventions. |
In many reviews authors include any drug within a specific drug category or categories.
example: DrugCategory - Immunoglobulins
Sometimes the intervention will be stated as any intervention.
example: Favipiravir Combined With Tocilizumab - Favipiravir AND Tocilizumab
example: Lopinavir And Ritonavir which is known as Kaletra
If this information is not available or not required the fields remain empty.
Some review questions will focus on
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For both the Intervention and Comparison components there is a 15 item classification of interventions from Davey et al.
This classification is built upon the Health Research Classification System developed by the UK Clinical Research Collaboration.
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Some studies are designed to compare several interventions with one another so that there is no single Comparison. These studies are referred to as multi-arm studies and each “arm” of the study receives one of the interventions.
If authors of a review state no clear Comparison each of the arms should be annotated as a New Arm in the Intervention
Where authors have split a multi-arm study into different rows
CD004217: Pain relief for neonatal circumcisionThis was a 3-arm trial that the authors split into 2 rows in the Included Studies table. The Stang-1988A row describes arms 1 and 3 of the trial, and the Stang-1988B row describes arms 2 and 3 (these were the 2 relevant comparisons from the study that were used in the Review). In this example, either Stang-1988A or Stang-1988B could be annotated as a 3 arm trial and the other row left without an annotation. Stang 1988-A was annotated. |
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