Chu Jacqueline J, Shamsunder Meghana G, Yin Shen, Rubenstein Robyn R, Slutsky Hanna, Fischer John P, Nelson Jonas A
Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Service, Department of Surgery, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, N.Y.
Division of Plastic Surgery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.
Plast Reconstr Surg Glob Open. 2022 Feb 9;10(2):e4003. doi: 10.1097/GOX.0000000000004003. eCollection 2022 Feb.
Randomized controlled trials, though considered the gold standard in clinical research, are often not feasible in plastic surgery research. Instead, researchers rely heavily on observational studies, leading to potential issues with confounding and selection bias. Propensity scoring-a statistical technique that estimates a patient's likelihood of having received the exposure of interest-can improve the comparability of study groups by either guiding the selection of study participants or generating a covariate that can be adjusted for in multivariate analyses. In this study, we conducted a comprehensive review of research articles published in three major plastic surgery journals (, , and ) to determine the utilization of propensity scoring methods in plastic surgery research from August 2018 to August 2020. We found that propensity scoring was used in only eight (0.8%) of 971 research articles, none of which fully reported all components of their propensity scoring methodology. We provide a brief overview of propensity score techniques and recommend guidelines for accurate reporting of propensity scoring methods for plastic surgery research. Improved understanding of propensity scoring may encourage plastic surgery researchers to incorporate the method in their own work and improve plastic surgeons' ability to understand and analyze future research studies that utilize propensity score methods.
随机对照试验虽被视为临床研究的金标准，但在整形手术研究中往往不可行。相反，研究人员严重依赖观察性研究，这导致了混杂和选择偏倚等潜在问题。倾向评分——一种估计患者接受感兴趣暴露的可能性的统计技术——可以通过指导研究参与者的选择或生成一个可在多变量分析中进行调整的协变量，来提高研究组之间的可比性。在本研究中，我们对在三本主要整形外科学术期刊（《 》、《 》和《 》）上发表的研究文章进行了全面综述，以确定2018年8月至2020年8月期间整形手术研究中倾向评分方法的使用情况。我们发现，在971篇研究文章中，只有8篇（0.8%）使用了倾向评分，其中没有一篇完整报告其倾向评分方法的所有组成部分。我们简要概述了倾向评分技术，并推荐了整形手术研究中倾向评分方法准确报告的指南。对倾向评分的更好理解可能会鼓励整形手术研究人员在自己的工作中采用该方法，并提高整形外科医生理解和分析未来使用倾向评分方法的研究的能力。
