Description
Systematic reviews are powerful instruments to quantify efficacy and potential for harm of interventions, to define risk-benefit ratios, and to identify patients who are most likely to profit or most likely to be harmed from a treatment. Systematic reviews of valid data should form the basis for clinical guidelines, and to define research agendas; they are likely to change our future management in anaesthesia. There are numerous published systematic reviews on subjects which are of interest to anaesthetists; about half of them are published in general medical or specialist (for instance, surgical) journals.
