Reported Outcomes in Published Systematic Reviews of Interdisciplinary Pain Treatment: Protocol for a Systematic Overview

BACKGROUND: Interdisciplinary pain treatment (IPT) is a complex intervention; its outcomes are very diverse, as are the methodologies for handling those outcomes. This diversity may hamper evidence-based decision making. Presently, there is no gold standard recommendation of how to select reported outcomes in published systematic reviews and meta-analyses to explicitly demonstrate the effectiveness of IPT. OBJECTIVE: In this systematic overview, we aim to evaluate the reported outcome domains and measurements across published systematic reviews and meta-analyses and to identify any methods, considerations, and discussion regarding the handling of the chosen outcome domains and measurements. METHODS: This article describes the protocol for a systematic overview of the outcomes reported in published systematic reviews and meta-analyses of randomized control trials for the effectiveness of IPT versus any control. To this end, we searched the PubMed, Cochrane Library, and Epistemonikos databases from inception to December 2019. Two independent investigators screened the titles, the abstracts of the identified records, and the full texts of the potentially eligible systematic reviews and meta-analyses, performed data extraction according to predefined forms, and rated the quality of the included systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The quality of the included systematic reviews and meta-analyses will be rated with AMSTAR (A MeaSurement Tool to Assess systematic Reviews) 2. Data will be analyzed descriptively and stratified by AMSTAR 2. RESULTS: We introduced the rationale and design of a systematic overview to summarize and map the chosen IPT outcome domains and the methods of handling these outcomes reported in published systematic reviews and meta-analyses. As of December 2019, we collected 5229 systematic reviews, of which 147 (2.81%) were examined in-depth for eligibility. Topline results are anticipated by September 2020. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study will be published as soon as they are available. Our results will fill a gap in the related literature and will be used to inform the development of a set of recommendations that can be applied in systematic reviews and hopefully serve as a gold standard. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): PRR1-10.2196/17795