EVIDENCE-BASED SURGERY. A GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING AND INTERPRETING THE SURGICAL LITERATURE

1. History of Evidence-Based Surgery (EBS)
2. The Steps of Practicing Evidence-Based Surgery (EBS)
3. Developing a Surgical Clinical Research Question: To Find the Answer in Literature Search or in Pursuing Clinical Research
4. Finding the Evidence Through Searching the Literature
5. Hierarchy of Evidence in Surgical Research
6. Evaluating Surgical Interventions
7. A Primer on Outcome Measures for Surgical Interventions
8. Patient-Important Outcome Measures in Surgical Care
9. Surrogate Endpoints
10. How to Assess an Article that Deals with Health-Related Quality of Life
11. Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing Surgical Interventions
12. How to Assess a Pilot Trial in Surgery
13. Non-inferiority Randomized Controlled Trials
14. Expertise-Based Randomized Controlled Trials
15. The Surgeon’s Guide to Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
16. Prospective and Retrospective Cohort Studies
17. Case-Control Studies
18. Evaluating Case Series in Surgery
19. Quality Improvement and Patient Safety in Surgery
20. Diagnostic Studies in Surgery
21. How to Assess a Prognostic Study
22. Decision Analysis and Surgery
23. Economic Evaluations in Surgery
24. Studies Reporting Harm in Surgery
25. Evaluating Surveys and Questionnaires in Surgical Research
26. Opinion Pieces in Surgery
27. Simple Statistical Tests and P Values
28. Confidence Intervals
29. Power and Sample Size
30. Subgroup Analyses in Surgery
31. Introduction to Clinical Practice Guidelines

The purpose of this book specifically is to teach surgeons (academic or community), surgical fellows and surgical residents regardless of the surgical specialty, the skills to appraise what they read in the surgical literature. Surgeons need to be able to understand what they read before applying the conclusions of a surgical article to their practice. As most surgeons do not have the extra training in health research methodology, understanding how the research was done, how to interpret the results and finally deciding to apply them to the patient level is indeed a difficult task. Chapters explain the methodological issues pertaining to the various study designs reported in the surgical literature. Most chapters begin with a clinical scenario with uncertain course of action with which most surgeons are struggling. Readers are taught how to search the literature for the best evidence that will answer the surgical problem under discussion. An identified article that seems relevant to the problem you are investigating can be appraised by addressing 3 key questions: 1). Is the study I am reading valid? 2). What are the results of this study? 3). Can I apply these results to my patients? While the primary goal of Evidence-Based Surgery is to teach surgeons how to appraise the surgical literature, an added benefit is that the concepts explained here may help research-minded surgeons produce higher quality research.

Features
• Provides evidence-based guidance.
• Includes informative illustrative cases.
• Highlights key points for best practice.