Primary clinical trials contained within the Myelopathy.org Literature Database on DCM were evaluated for alignment with the research priorities included in the final face-to-face consensus meeting.
Myelopathy.org literature database
Systematic review and meta-analysis, otherwise known as research synthesis, are important tools to quantitatively summarise current knowledge about a topic. Their findings are fundamentally underpinned on the studies that they identify. Within the field of DCM, there is inconsistent disease terminology, with an absence of index terms or codes [7], which makes literature searching extremely inefficient. For this reason, and to support work by the Myelopathy.org charity, a hand indexed database of primary clinical articles has been maintained.
The dataset was built using a search of Embase and MEDLINE for [“Cervical”] AND [“Myelopathy”]. It includes primary clinical human trials, in which DCM is the primary condition being addressed, with the full text available in English. Animal studies, case reports, letters, editorials, reviews, technical notes, commentaries, proposals and corrections were excluded.
The database was initially built on previous systematic reviews [2, 3] and initially contained all papers published up to December 31, 2015 [8]. The last update was performed on August 08, 2020. This updated database forms the basis of this study.
Analysis
Each paper was assessed (by authors BG, HB, FB, RD, MK, CIPS, JQT) for alignment to the established research priorities. Each paper was allocated to one or more priorities, or deemed to be not aligned to any priority.
The following information was extracted for each paper: title, abstract, author names, country of corresponding author, year of publication, research theme (as per [8]), patient characteristics (number of patients, surgical vs. non-surgical treatment) and study design (prospective or retrospective, cohort or case-control, level of evidence).
Statistical analysis was used to detect differences in research activity between research priorities and over time. SPSS Statistics (IBM Corporation, Armonk, NY) was used for all calculations. Shapiro-Wilk tests were used to analyse normality of data, and parametric or non-parametric tests were used accordingly. Significance was set at p < .05. We report mean ± standard deviation unless otherwise specified.