Guidelines for uveal melanoma: a critical appraisal of systematically identified guidelines using the AGREE II and AGREE-REX instrument

PURPOSE: Clinical practice guidelines provide recommendations for the management of diseases. In orphan conditions such as uveal melanoma (UM), guideline developers are challenged to provide practical and useful guidance even in the absence of high-quality evidence. Here, we assessed the methodological quality and identified deficiencies of international guidelines on UM as a base for future guideline development. METHODS: A systematic search was carried out in guideline databases, Medline and Embase until 27th May 2019 for guidelines on UM published between 2004 and 2019. Five independent reviewers assessed the methodological quality of the identified guidelines using the instruments “Appraisal of Guidelines for Research and Evaluation II” (AGREE II) and AGREE-REX (Recommendation EXcellence). Descriptive analysis was performed and subgroup differences were explored with the Kruskal–Wallis (H) test. The relationship between the individual domains and items of the instruments were examined using Spearman’s correlation. RESULTS: Five guidelines published from 2014 to 2018 by consortia of the United States of America, Canada and the United Kingdom (UK) were included. The highest scores were obtained by the UK guideline fulfilling 48–86% of criteria in AGREE II and 30–60% for AGREE-REX. All guidelines showed deficiencies in the domains “editorial independence”, “applicability”, and “recommendation”. Subgroup differences were identified only for the domain “editorial independence”. CONCLUSION: The UK guideline achieved the highest scores with both instruments and may serve as a basis for future guideline development in UM. The domains “editorial independence”, “recommendation”, and “applicability” were identified as methodological weaknesses and require particular attention and improvement in future guidelines. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s00432-020-03141-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.