Table 3.
Quality of the body of evidence by a GRADE narrative assessment.
| Certainty assessment | Impact | Certainty | Importance | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No. of studies | Study design | Risk of bias | Inconsistency | Indirectness | Imprecision | Other considerations | |||
| Association between periodontitis and diabetic retinopathy | |||||||||
| 3 (11, 16, 17) | Observational studies | Not seriousa | Not serious | Not serious | Seriousb | All plausible residual confounding would reduce the demonstrated effect | In three studies, the association between DR and periodontitis in diabetic patients was evaluated. In all studies, there was a statistically significant prevalence of RD in patients with periodontitis and diabetes. However, problems related to reduced sample sizes impair precision analysis of these association | ⊕⊕○○ LOW | IMPORTANT |
CI, confidence interval.
a
Three studies analyzed groups without confounder adjustments.
b
Small sample sizes for imprecision evaluation.
⊕○○○Very low; ⊕⊕○○Low; ⊕⊕○○Moderate; ⊕⊕⊕○High; ⊕⊕⊕⊕Very high. Quality of evidence may vary to high (high confidence on the estimated effect), to moderate (moderate confidence of the effect), to low or very low (little confidence on the estimated effect, the true effect is likely to be substantially different from the estimate of effect).