We are pleased to announce that the AMSTAR team received a two year operating grant from CIHR with Dr. Beverley Shea as the Principal Investigator. We submitted a proposal through the Health Research and Services Peer review group. The project is titled “AMSTAR_NRS: Helping decision makers helping decision makers distinguish high and low quality systematic reviews of non-randomized studies.

With this grant, we will develop an instrument that will enable users to assess systematic reviews of non-randomized studies (NRS). We will call this instrument AMSTAR_NRS. The original AMSTAR was developed to assess reviews that included only Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs). Some of the items do not apply to NRS such as blinding, and will therefore render a NRS review to be of low quality. There are also other items that need to be evaluated in such reviews that will not be in the original AMSTAR.

The 23rd Annual Cochrane Colloquium will take place in Vienna, Austria on the 3RD to 7th of October 2015. The AMSTAR team will be there and will present on the draft AMSTAR_NRS tool in an effort to link research to action. We will update the findings here once the workshop takes place. Please visit the Cochrane website for more information pertaining to the 2015 Colloquium.