Outcome heterogeneity and bias in acute experimental spinal cord injury A meta-analysis

This study looks at how well animal research on spinal cord injuries translates to treatments for humans. It checks for biases and differences in study results. The research found that there are biases in how animal studies are designed and reported, which can make potential treatments seem more effective than they really are. These biases can cause problems when trying to develop new therapies for spinal cord injuries, because the initial research might not be accurate.

• 1
  Interventions reported a neurobehavioral outcome improvement of 26.3%.
• 2
  Lack of blinding results in evaluation bias that reduces the internal reliability of the experiment and accounts for significantly inflated effect sizes by 7.2%.
• 3
  Assessment of publication bias suggested that between 2% and 41% of experiments remain unpublished.