Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Prevalence of Hypertension in Renal Patients in Iran: Methodological Issues on Reporting.

To Editor,

We read with great interest the review article “Prevalence of Hypertension in Renal Diseases in Iran: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis” by Motedayen et al., published in Int J Prev Med 2019.[1]

Although the reviewers have presented the process of systematic search via Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, there is a slight concordance between reported details and the PRISMA guidelines.

The reviewers have not provided details of the information on systematic search of the literature including full search strategy or combining of terms strategy. More detailed information for at least one database, as well as Boolean operations should be provided, to ensure that it could be repeated

The flowchart of systematic review should be presented at the results section. In this review, the flowchart for the search strategy process, the number of studies screened/include studies are presented in methods[2]

Reviewers mentioned they used STROBE to assess methodological quality of studies. STROBE assesses the quality of reporting and is not meant to appraise the methodological quality of a study. Reviewers should consider appraising the articles with other validated measures appropriate. There is inadequate explanation about results of the quality assessment. The quality assessment of included studies in this review only provided data on used checklist and the document does not provide sufficient information about the quality assessment scores. This information should be reported to assess whether the quality of included studies were sufficient. The strength of the conclusions drawn in the systematic reviews depends on the included studies that meet a minimum standard of quality[3]

In quality evaluation section, reviewers mentioned the prevalence of osteoporosis, while in text and aims of study they addressed the prevalence of hypertension

As a systematic review study, arrange of the figures and tables of the study does not meet the standards of the journal which has been mentioned in guide for authors and arrange of the figures of this study has some errors. For example, the reviewers mentioned that the confidence interval for each study based on the random effects model is presented in Diagram 1. Mentioned diagram are not directly relative to the results of random effects model

To assess the publication bias in the meta-analyses of prevalence studies, the use of funnel plots is not applicable, because the mentioned estimate discovered unpublished negative studies in clinical trials.[2]

Financial support and sponsorship

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Conflicts of interest

There are no conflicts of interest.