Reporting Certainty of Evidence on E-Cigarette Use for Adult Smoking Cessation

摘要

The National Academy of Medicine recommends evaluating the quality of the body of evidence for each outcome in a systematic review.1 Endorsed by more than 100 organizations internationally, Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) provides an explicit, systematic, and transparent approach to this assessment of the quality of evidence (or “certainty of evidence”).2 It is designed for evaluating the certainty of evidence from randomized clinical trials (RCTs) on therapeutic interventions to inform clinical decision making as well as observational studies on exposures to inform public health decision making.3 Consequently, GRADE can be used to assess certainty of evidence in the two distinct bodies of evidence that Wang et al. discuss in their article (this issue of AJPH, p. 230) on e-cigarette use for adult smoking cessation: RCTs of e-cigarettes as a prescription therapy and observational studies of e-cigarettes as consumer products.