This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Related letters  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Patient-Physician Relationship/ Care  • End-of-life Care/ Palliative Medicine  • Quality of Life  • Statistics and Research Methods  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In Reply: Dr Bruera notes that in our review the palliative care interventions, settings, and populations were diverse and that some of the control groups also received a form of palliative care. Our inclusion criteria were purposefully broad to ensure maximal transparency of our results and conclusions. This strategy of inclusiveness has been used in previous reviews of palliative care services^1-2 and is generally preferred in systematic reviews for reasons that have a sound methodologic basis. Broad systematic reviews allow research findings to be assessed across diverse settings and study populations, reducing the risk of bias or chance results and maximizing generalizability.³

Similarly, pragmatic descriptions of the components of the intervention are preferred to established constructs, which otherwise inject bias for a specific intervention. Narrow reviews are in effect subgroup analyses, and increasing the breadth of a review enriches the findings rather than detracting from them. The most transparent approach . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Camilla Zimmermann, MD, MSc
camilla.zimmermann@uhn.on.ca
Department of Psychosocial Oncology and Palliative Care

Ian F. Tannock, MD, PhD
Department of Medical Oncology

Gary Rodin, MD
Department of Psychosocial Oncology and Palliative Care
Princess Margaret Hospital
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLE

Effectiveness of Specialized Palliative Care: A Systematic Review
Camilla Zimmermann, Rachel Riechelmann, Monika Krzyzanowska, Gary Rodin, and Ian Tannock
JAMA. 2008;299(14):1698-1709.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT  

RELATED LETTERS

Studying the Effectiveness of Palliative Care
Eduardo Bruera
JAMA. 2008;300(9):1022.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Studying the Effectiveness of Palliative Care
Joan Penrod, R. Sean Morrison, and Diane E. Meier
JAMA. 2008;300(9):1022-1023.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT