Scope of our work

Scope

The scope of the Cochrane Heart Group includes primary prevention, acute treatment, secondary prevention and rehabilitation, in all forms of heart disease, including ischaemic heart disease, heart diseases more common in developing countries, arrhythmias, valvular and congenital heart diseases.

The Cochrane Heart Group draws on sources of evidence that include predominantly individual patient, parallel group randomised controlled trials (RCTs), community controlled trials, quasi-experimental designs (i.e. before and after intervention studies, contemporary non-randomised controlled comparisons). These latter designs are mainly being used in topics concerned with public health policy and practice where individual patient, parallel group randomised controlled trials are inappropriate tests of the efficacy of community level interventions.

Our priority for accepting reviews are that the review covers heart disease where the disease burden is considerable, i.e affects many people, disease types or interventions with special reference to heart disease in low income countries, for example rheumatic fever, Chagas disease and Brughada syndrome, and reviews on topics which are not the topic of current or recent good quality systematic reviews available in the public domain. For example a topic recently systeamtcally reviewd by AHRQ or the HTA UK for example.