Methodological quality of systematic reviews on treatments for Alzheimer’s disease: a cross-sectional study

Table 4 Associations between bibliographical characteristics of systematic reviews and overall methodological quality: multi-ordinal regression^f

Bibliographical characteristics (independent variable)	AOR (95% CI)	*P-values*^¶
Cochrane SRs^a	31.9 (3.81–266.9)	0.001
An update of a previous SR^b	0.35 (0.10–1.27)	0.111
Year of publication^c
2019–2021	2.43 (0.91–6.49)	0.076
2016–2018	1.87 (0.67–5.17)	0.230
Number of review authors	1.06 (0.91–1.22)	0.464
Publication journal impact factor in the year before SR publication	1.11 (0.84–1.47)	0.458
Types of treatment^d
Both types	3.37 (0.46–24.6)	0.230
Pharmacological treatments	3.96 (1.27–12.3)	0.017
Location of corresponding author^e
Corresponding author from Africa	10.6 (0.16–704.0)	0.272
Corresponding author from Oceania	0.58 (0.04–7.88)	0.681
Corresponding author from Asia	0.40 (0.11–1.47)	0.167
Corresponding author from America	0.29 (0.06–1.45)	0.131

AOR adjusted odds ratio, CI confidence interval, SR systematic review
¶ P values for both Pearson and deviance tests > 0.1 (Pearson test: p=0.303, deviance test: p=1.000), indicating good-model-fit
^aNon-Cochrane SRs were used as reference
^bSRs that are not updates of previous reviews were used as reference
^cYear of publication was divided into three periods (2014–2015, 2016–2018, 2019–2021). SRs published in 2014–2015 were used as reference
^dSRs of non-pharmacological interventions were used as reference
^eSRs led by the corresponding author from Europe were used as reference
^fOverall methodological quality was an overall rating of methodological quality for each included SR, which was generated based on the assessment results of the 16 AMSTAR2 items. Detailed operational guidance for defining each rank of quality can be found in Additional file 1: Appendix 3

ISSN: 1758-9193