Systematic review for MS – Share your view questionnaire
The Research and Access Team at the MS International Federation want to know more about which research questions are important and relevant for the care of people with MS. Can you spare 10-25 minutes to complete a short questionnaire? This survey is open to people with MS, their families and carers, researchers and clinicians.
What is a systematic review?
Research is complex and there are often factors that can influence the results of scientific experiments and clinical trials. For example, people taking part in a clinical trial are all individuals and are all slightly different in many ways. Researchers will always try their best to control and correct anything that may influence results, but results are never clear-cut. In other words, you rarely see a drug that is 100% effective in a 100% of people.
This is why systematic reviews are needed. They identify, collect, review and summarise all existing scientific evidence to answer a specific question. To be very clear, no new scientific experiments or clinical trials are conducted, instead all previously published research (e.g. in scientific journals, clinical trial databases) are considered together to get a better understanding of what all of the evidence is telling us when put together.
How can you share your views?
This is a unique opportunity for the MS community to influence their work and get answers to questions that are most important to them.
The short questionnaire (10-25min) is now open and available until the 20th December 2020 in 11 different languages to help people directly express their views: https://msrdcns.cochrane.org/survey-research-priorities-multiple-sclerosis
Please note that the questionnaire does not collect personal information but asks about the your relationship with MS, e.g. whether they are an individual with MS, a researcher or an MS organisation, as this may affect how people prioritise different questions.
We would like to ask you to:
Fill in the questionnaire yourself
Share the questionnaire with your families and carers
Follow this link to complete the survey
Read more on MSIF Connections: https://www.msif.org/news/2020/11/09/whats-your-ms-research-priority/
What happens next?
More information about the Cochrane project and next stages of the prioritisation exercise can be found here: https://msrdcns.cochrane.org/priority-setting-multiple-sclerosis-international-survey.
There will be a second round of prioritisation once the first questionnaire is closed.
Cochrane systematic reviews are all published in the Cochrane library and can be accessed here: https://ms.cochrane.org/our-review
