The UK Faculty of Public Health has recently taken ownership of the Health Knowledge resource. This new, advert-free website is still under development and there may be some issues accessing content. Additionally, the content has not been audited or verified by the Faculty of Public Health as part of an ongoing quality assurance process and as such certain material included maybe out of date. If you have any concerns regarding content you should seek to independently verify this.

Answer 5

We thought the answer was CAN'T TELL.

The Forest plot is not good as there are no numbers contributing to the plot. It is not clear as to why only 77 subjects' data was pooled as there were 89 subjects in these trials. Data was aggregated from Likert scales with 6 or more categories and VAS with 100 categories. Also results were combined for stretching before exercise and stretching after exercise, and this may not be appropriate.

With the survival curves having so many different numbers of outcomes in one trial compared to another (possibly because of the different outcomes they collected in each), it is debateable whether they should have combined them to give a pooled Hazard Ratio. Also, the pooled ratio seems to be much closer to the hazard ratio with the lower event rates, which does not make sense.