Abstract
PurposeSoft tissue sarcomas are a heterogeneous group of rare tumours of mesenchymal origin. Evidence mapping is one of the most didactic and friendly approaches to organise and summarise the range of research activity in broad topic fields. The objective of this evidence mapping is to identify, describe and organise the current available evidence about therapeutic interventions on soft tissues sarcomas.MethodsWe followed the methodology of global evidence mapping. We performed a search of the PubMed, EMBASE, The Cochrane Library and Epistemonikos to identify systematic reviews (SRs) with or without meta-analyses published between 1990 and March 2016. Two independent literature reviewers assessed eligibility and extracted data. Methodological quality of the included systematic reviews was assessed using AMSTAR. We organised the results according to identified PICO questions and used tables and a bubble plot to display the results.ResultsThe map is based on 24 SRs that met eligibility criteria and included 66 individual studies. Three-quarters were either observational or uncontrolled clinical trials. The quality of the included SRs was in general moderate or high. We identified 64 PICO questions from them. The corresponding results mostly favoured the intervention arm.ConclusionsThis evidence mapping was built on the basis of SRs, which mostly included non-experimental studies and were qualified by the AMSTAR tool as of moderate quality. The evidence mapping created from PICO questions is a useful approach to describe complex and huge clinical topics through graphical media and orientate further research to fulfil the existing gaps. However, it is important to delimitate the steps of the evidence mapping in a pre-established protocol.
Highlights
Soft tissues sarcomas (STS) are a group of rare tumours of mesenchymal origin, with an estimated incidence of 4.74 per 100,000 adults per year in Europe [1,2,3], whilst in children they represent 7–10% of all childhood cancers [4]
This graphic provides information in three dimensions: (1) in the x-axis, there is the rating of authors conclusions as “beneficial”, “probably beneficial”, “harmful”, “no effect” and “inconclusive”; (2) in the y-axis, the AMSTAR assessment is shown; and (3) we displayed the bubble size proportionally to the number of individual studies included in the systematic reviews (SRs)
We reported the evidence mapping on gastrointestinal stromal tumours (GIST) [13], and we focus on soft tissue sarcomas
Summary
Soft tissues sarcomas (STS) are a group of rare tumours of mesenchymal origin, with an estimated incidence of 4.74 per 100,000 adults per year in Europe [1,2,3], whilst in children they represent 7–10% of all childhood cancers [4]. Clinical and Translational Oncology (2019) 21:1398–1412 in very extensive areas, allowing to systematically characterise the evidence, identify gaps in knowledge and prioritise new research questions. This strategy can be the first approach to conduct a further systematic review or to provide a framework to inform policy development [9,10,11,12]. The goal of this evidence mapping is to identify, describe and organise the current available evidence about therapeutic interventions on sarcomas. We reported the results corresponding to GIST [13]
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