The effect of catheter-based sham renal denervation in hypertension: systematic review and meta-analysis

Table 4 Certainty of Evidence of sham intervention for renal denervation compared to baseline values for adult patients with hypertension

Certainty assessment
Participants (studies)	Risk of bias	Inconsistency	Indirectness	Imprecision	Publication bias	Overall certainty of evidence
Ambulatory Systolic Blood Pressure
637 (9 Pre-post data RCTs)	serious^a	serious^b	not serious	not serious	publication bias strongly suspected^c	\(\oplus\)◯◯◯ Very low
Ambulatory Diastolic Blood Pressure
637 (9 Pre-post data RCTs)	serious^a	serious^d	not serious	not serious	none	\(\oplus\)\(\oplus\)◯◯ Low
Office Systolic Blood Pressure
570 (7 Pre-post data RCTs)	serious^a	serious^e	not serious	not serious	none	\(\oplus\)\(\oplus\)◯◯ Low
Office Diastolic Blood Pressure
570 (7 Pre-post data RCTs)	serious^a	not serious	not serious	not serious	none	\(\oplus\)\(\oplus\)◯◯ Low

RCTs: randomized clinical trials
a. Five trials were considered as low risk of bias, while 3 trials had some concerns regarding outcome measurement of the outcome since the trial funder was in charge of data collection and management. 1 trial was considered to have a high risk of bias, due to missing outcome data that may be dependent on its true value
b. Heterogeneity (i²) = 51.2%; c. Publication bias was assessed via funnel plot asymmetry, which was statistically significant (P = 0.0016); d. Heterogeneity (i²) = 43.41%;
e. Heterogeneity (i²) = 49.8%;

ISSN: 1471-2261