Hello!
My SR with meta-analysis will be looking at risk-reducing salpingo oophorectomy on ovarian/peritoneal/falloptian tube cancer risks, as well as risk-reduction mastectomy on breast cancer risks in BRCA2+ carriers.
For the inclusion criteria, am I allowed to include people who previously had breast cancer in my search for the ovarian cancer risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy data and people who never had breast cancer before for the breast cancer mastectomy data?
Meaning, am I allowed to have two types of inclusion criteria in one SR as I have two study types being analyzed, or must it only contain people with/without breast cancer? The unifying factor is that all participants are BRCA2+ carriers and are women.
I hope this makes sense!!
Before trying to give a tentative answer, I would like to ask: What is your research question / are your research questions? And a bit nitpicky: Allowed by who?
My impression is that you have two quite distinct research questions:
- What is the effect on ovarian cancer of salpingo-oophorectomy in women who are BRCA2+ and have a history of breast cancer?
- What is the effect on breast cancer of mastectomy in women who are BRCA2+ without a history of breast cancer?
I expect that you will find no trials that address both questions at the same time, and even if they do, they will very likely report on the two questions separately.
Whether you say that you do one SLR or two does not seem to matter substantially, therefore I would say: call it what you think is best.
Doing one or two meta-analyses of course does make a substantial difference. I see no reason why you would want to put both those questions into one meta-analysis but maybe you do. E.g. is there any provider interested in the result of that one meta-analysis? (I can’t imagine that any patient has that interest, if only because no-one patient can have both a history of breast cancer and not have that.)
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