Table 1.

Strength of Evidence grading used in these Guidelines.

Strength of evidence	Question	Meaning
I	Effectiveness	Multiple Randomized Controlled Trials or Systematic Reviews of such studies
	Diagnosis	Multiple Randomized Controlled Trials, or Cross-sectional Studies with verification by reference (gold) standard, or Systematic Reviews of such studies
II	Effectiveness	One Randomized Controlled Trial
	Diagnosis	One Randomized Controlled Trial, or one Cross-sectional Study with verification by reference (gold) standard
III	Effectiveness	Multiple Controlled nonrandomized Studies or Systematic Reviews of such studies
	Diagnosis	Multiple Cross-sectional Studies with incomplete & unbalanced verification with reference (gold) standard
IV	Effectiveness	Other studies
	Diagnosis
V	Effectiveness	SOSORT Consensus with more than 90% of agreement
	Diagnosis
VI	Effectiveness	SOSORT Consensus with 70 to 89% of agreement
	Diagnosis

Questions on Effectiveness (treatment results) and Diagnosis (assessment) have been considered