Study of the Status of STROBE's criteria in the reports of studies related to the prognosis of patients admitted to intensive care unit

The importance of accurately determining the prognosis of patients admitted to the ICU and the potential benefits of using severity of disease scoring systems will determine the need to use valid accreditation guidelines for studies publishing. This study examines the status of observing the STROBE criteria by Iranian researchers in the reports of studies related to the prognosis of patients admitted to the ICU.
Methods and materials: In this cross-sectional study, by selecting appropriate keywords, in a systematic review, all prognostic cohort articles published by Iranian researchers in prestigious domestic and international journals and included at least one of the severity scoring systems were evaluated according to STROBE's statement (June 2012 to June 2018). Initially, Persian databases including Magiran, SID, IranDOC and Iranmedex, and the English databases including PubMed and Scopus were searched and 1941 articles were found, then, with the removal of duplicate and unrelated articles, and observing the entry criteria, the final selection of 32 articles was selected. Data were analyzed by SPSS version 25 and descriptive statistic and analytical analyzes using Kruskal-Wallis tests, linear regression and Spearman correlation coefficient were performed. In 32 articles reviewed, the overall agreement rate for studies with STROBE's statement was 58.26% (19.81 ± 4.92% of 32 scores). According to the statement, the explanation of how to deal with incomplete data, the reasons for not attending each phase, and the use of the workflow chart, were the most weaknesses of the published articles reporting. The linear regression test indicated that the scores of the parts of the methods and the results were good indicators for predicting the final STROBE score (p = 0.003 and p = 0.005, respectively). The quality of the reported cohort articles published by Iranian researchers was at an acceptable level. Full compliance with the recommendations of the most up-to-date reporting guidelines is recommended to achieve the best available evidence.