Department of Medicine, Hackensack Meridian Health Mountainside Medical Center, Montclair, NJ, USA.
Curr Med Res Opin. 2021 Feb;37(2):321-326. doi: 10.1080/03007995.2020.1860922. Epub 2021 Jan 11.
Courtesy of the development of the Internet, bursts of information technology, and globalization, huge multicenter studies along with meta-analyses have been introduced to the medical sciences society. Meta-analyses and multicenter studies revolutionized modern medicine and drug development, and empowered evidence based medicine by providing extremely high levels of evidence. Nevertheless, there are occasions that while results of local multi/single center studies showed efficacy of a new treatment, larger multicenter studies or meta-analyses failed to show efficacy, and vice versa. Generally, bigger studies are more powerful and we rely on their results in clinical decision making. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that in certain circumstances, single center studies are of great importance, and are preferred to multicenter studies and meta-analyses. In order to have a better understanding of why and when multicenter studies along with meta-analyses might not be the best options, we have discussed three different scenarios.
得益于互联网的发展、信息技术的爆发和全球化，大量的多中心研究和荟萃分析已经被引入医学科学界。荟萃分析和多中心研究彻底改变了现代医学和药物开发，并通过提供极高水平的证据为循证医学提供了支持。然而，有时尽管局部多中心/单中心研究显示出新治疗方法的疗效，但更大规模的多中心研究或荟萃分析却未能显示出疗效，反之亦然。通常情况下，更大规模的研究更有说服力，我们依赖于它们的结果来做出临床决策。然而，我们应该记住，在某些情况下，单中心研究也非常重要，并且比多中心研究和荟萃分析更受青睐。为了更好地理解为什么以及何时多中心研究和荟萃分析可能不是最佳选择，我们讨论了三种不同的情况。
