Cristóbal Loézar

• Medical Doctor at University of Valparaíso

Background Diabetic macular oedema (DME) is a worldwide major cause of low vision and blindness. Intravitreal antivascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) constitutes an effective treatment. Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are synthesis documents that seek to improve patient care. Objectives To identify CPGs that make anti-VEGF recommend...

Healthcare professionals make decisions in a context of uncertainty. When making a diagnosis, relevant patient characteristics are categorized to fit a particular condition that explains what the patient is experiencing. During the diagnostic process, tools such as the medical interview, physical examination, and other complementary tests support t...

Resumen Introducción La salud basada en evidencia (SBE) integra el uso de la mejor evidencia, la experiencia clínica y los valores y preferencias del paciente para la toma de decisiones. Su incorporación en las carreras sanitarias de Chile es desconocida. Métodos Se realizó un estudio de corte transversal para evaluar la incorporación de SBE en l...

The significant increase in scientific evidence production has led to the creation of methods to facilitate evidence review and synthesis. In turn, this has resulted in the emergence of different designs depending on the review’s objective. Evidence gap maps constitute a novel approach for literature review. They are thematic collections of a broad...

This article is part of a collaborative methodological series of narrative reviews on biostatistics and clinical epidemiology. This review aims to present basic concepts about the minimal clinically important difference and its use in the field of clinical research and evidence synthesis. The minimal clinically important difference is defined as th...

The certainty of the evidence for interventions is the certainty or confidence that the true effect is within a particular range or relative to a threshold. In the new pyramid of evidence, systematic reviews represent the magnifying glass through which this certainty is evaluated. The GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Ev...

This article is the first in a collaborative methodological series of narrative reviews on biostatistics and clinical epidemiology. This review aims to pre�sent rapid reviews, compare them with systematic reviews, and mention how they can be used. Rapid reviews use a methodology like systematic reviews, but through shortcuts applied, they can at...

Objective The Chilean health system mandates providers to ensure assistance under a guaranteed system, the Explicit Guarantees in Healthcare Program (EGH). The Health Ministry has developed clinical practice guidelines (CPG), but independent assessment of their quality is lacking. Therefore, we assessed all CPG of the EGH. Study Design and Setting...

Introduction: Phacoeresis is the procedure through which the lens is surgically removed to treat cataracts. A corneal endothelial loss is a recognized sequel. Although several factors associated with this harm have been described, the surgeon’s prior experience has been scarcely evaluated. Objectives: To assess the association between the surgeo...

Systematic reviews help healthcare professionals, consumers and other stakeholders when making decisions about health issues. Some systematic reviews, however, may not be reliable due to the presence of bias, and ROBIS is a tool designed to identify them. In this research we translated and validated the Spanish version of the instrument, to encoura...

Background : Evidence-based health care (EBH) is the conscientious, explicit, judicious and reasonable use of the best available evidence to make decisions about the care of individual patients, integrating clinical experience, patients' values, and the best available information. Achieving significant learning and skills in EBH practice is a desir...

Background: Critical thinking and research are considered priority domains for medical education and their introduction into the medical curriculum significantly improves learning. The School of Medicine at the University of Valparaíso has offered a competency-based curriculum since 2005, which includes two courses of progressive formation: 'Resear...

Background: Cochrane recommends a specific tool for assessing risk of bias, where the domain called 'other bias' (OB) refers to any potential systematic error not included within the classical bias which may lead to deviations from the truth. Nevertheless, the interpretation of other bias is often vague, no guidelines have been provided. Moreover,...

Purpose: Properly conducted controlled clinical trials (CCTs) provide the highest level of evidence for optimising decision-making in healthcare. Electronic search strategies do not exhaustively retrieve them, because of issues related to indexing, exclusion of journals in languages other than English, among others. A handsearch approach is therefo...

This is a protocol for a Cochrane Review (Intervention). The objectives are as follows: To assess the effects of taxanes as part of a combined or single-agent therapy versus other agents or best supportive care as first- or second-line treatment for advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). A secondary objective is to assess different modes or s...

Critical appraisal of the 86 clinical practice guidelines of the ”explicit guarantees in healthcare” program in Chile, using AGREE-II tool

Introduction: In Chile, an important proportion of public hospitals are teaching hospitals. The objective of this study was to determine and compare the levels of satisfaction with health care services in one teaching hospital and one non teaching hospital. Material and method: Cross-sectional study. A survey was carried out to evaluate satis- fact...