If you want to look at predictive risk, you should only include longitudinal studies.  Cross-sectional studies really get at associations.

1. it depends on how many studies are available to review. If there are enough prospective (cohort  or RCT's ) then just stick with that as you would be more comfortable in your recommendations. If not then you will have to consider retrospective, cross section and case control but clearly none of these can really assess risk only an association.

2. Down's and Black Quality Assessment tool (look at the Groin systematic review I have from early this year on Research gate as this is the tool that I used.

3. Again take a look at the groin systematic review it is summarized nicely there.

Hi buddy! :) How's life? Long time no see. 

You want to do a systematic of review of the risk factors of ...? For such a SR you need observational studies, including case-control and prospective cohort studies. 

In terms of the risk of bias tool for such studies, Downs and Black or Newcastle-Ottawa are commonly used, although there is no consensus as to which one is preferred. 

Performing meta-analysis might be difficult for obvious reasons. But, if you assess that the studies are appropriately conducted and are relatively resistant to the bias, then you might use a meta-analysis. The Cochrane Handbook suggests using adjusted effect estimates, but to conduct analysis as you would for the SR on RCTs.

You might find this useful: 

http://handbook.cochrane.org/index.htm#part_2_general_methods_for_cochrane_reviews.htm

Cheers!

In case of doubt I would see other systematic reviews to compare methods. Personally I would probably only include as many studies as possible, and so all study designs that make sense. 

As for the risk of bias tool, the one I think is most applicable and useful is the ACROBAT tool, provided by Cochrane. 

Hope this was useful!

My advice to you is to attend a training course on performing SR. 

Please check cochrane website.

It's helpful if you can do a scoping exercise to get a feel for what's out there. Usually you'd have to do this when working up the systematic review protocol. As already mentioned above cross-sectional studies can't indicate predictive risk, only an association. If there are sufficient RCTs then you might justify focusing only on RCTs but if not then it would make sense to include other longitudinal designs. If you do include multiple study designs then you should use different critical appraisal tools to cover these. Downs and Black and Newcastle-Ottawa as already mentioned above are useful but not without limitations. When selecting a critical appraisal tool it may help to pilot test it on a subset of studies (e.g. some identified in scoping) as this may identify whether it needs modifying for your particular question and can sometimes highlight issues not foreseen. Deeks and colleagues reviewed 194 different tools for critically appraising non-randomised studies, including those mentioned already (Health Technology Assessment 2007; 36: 666-676). Although a fairly old paper now I think this is still useful as a general guide due to the range of tools covered. New tools are continually being developed, e.g. the Cochrane Collaboration has developed "ACROBAT-NRSI" for non-randomised studies although it is a beta version at present and in my opinion is quite a "clunky" tool to use because it is fairly complex (I think some general principles underpinning that tool are really useful  though - but it is probably too early to use this approach since more testing and validation would be needed). Of course, there is considerable flexibility with any tool to modify it so long as you clearly report how and why this was done. It is important to justify why you used any particular tool(s) and to be honest about any limitations, noting this in the systematic review report.

Regarding the outcome measures to include in searches, you might find that you don't need to specify this level of detail in the search strategy - a pilot test of your draft strategy to see whether it picks up the outcomes you need can be very valuable. If you were to find large numbers of bibliographic records which don't report relevant statistical outcomes then perhaps you could try adding statistical terms in to the search strategy to limit the searches, but you would have to be confident that you wouldn't be excluding studies that don't report statistical outcomes in their title/abstract (or whatever fields you are searching).

Hope your review goes well... Good Luck!

For second query ...

The methodological quality assessment tools for preclinical and clinical studies, systematic review and meta-analysis, and clinical practice guideline: a systematic review. The study over-viewed all quality assessment methods currently available.

Good Luck ...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jebm.12141/full

Thank you everyone for your replies. It is great to see my old friends here. 

It sounds like you were interested in the "risk factors of a disease" rather than the relative benefits or harms of an intervention. Depending on how you wish to apply the data eventually, there are several possible approaches to it.

One approach is to look at this a form of prognostic (systematic) review. The Cochrane Prognosis methods group have some useful information under their resources. http://prognosismethods.cochrane.org/welcome

They had also presented the ROB tool recently. https://colloquium.cochrane.org/workshops/systematic-reviews-prognostic-studies-2-assessing-risk-bias-studies-prognostic-factors

Within the group, you should also find information on people who have a interest of search terms for these studies.  All the best.

Hi,

For RCTs, use Cochrane risk of bias assessment tool.

For non-randomized studies, use ACROBAT-NRSI by Cochrane also.

For observational studies, use NOS scale

BW

Negida.A

http://www.ohri.ca/programs/clinical_epidemiology/oxford.asp

1.Cohort and case control studies are definitely the best ones to evaluate risk but cross-sectional studies can also do it with less power.

2.Newcastle-Otava scale is probably the best tool. ACROBAT will also do it but it as built having in mind observacional studies of therapeutic interventions

3. Its a synonym but you should also had risk ratio. Have in mind that there are validated search filters for this kind of studies (see BMJ evidence search filters website) and you don't want to restrict your search to studies where those terms are written, because sometimes you will only have raw data in the paper but you will be able to calculate the risk measure.

What tools I can use to assess article with sequential study design? Thank you!

Don't blindly use tools unless you are sure they are fit for purpose and meet your specific requirements. If you are interested in assessing the risk of bias (internal validity) or generalisability (external validity) then you should use a tool that has construct validity to assess these (i.e. the tool actually measures what it claims to). Many tools conflate different measures such as internal validity, external validity, precision and/or reporting. The Newcastle Ottawa scale is a classic example - it was never formally intended to be used by the wider evidence synthesis community, has never been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and does not have any instructions or user manual. Yet people keep recommending this tool.

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