Guidelines for Complications of Cancer Treatment Vol VIII Part B

The current guidelines are actually the update to theoriginal guidelines published in 2004. There were severaldifferences in the guidelines: in the process of funding,grading of evidence and actual recommendationsthemselves.The 2004 guidelines were funded from unrestrictededucational grants from industry, this was heavilycriticized. In the current version of the guidelines, noindustry grants were used for committee meeting.The guidelines process included a modified Delphimethod, a consensus conference, several subsequentmeetings of subgroups and key individuals,teleconferences and electronic-based discussions amongsubgroups and members of the entire committee, andtwo follow-up group meetings in 2007.The GRADE Methodology (Table 1) was used fordetermining the quality of evidence. Depeding on thequality of evidence, relative importance of the outcomes,baseline risks of outcomes, magnitude of relative risk,including benefits, harms, and burden, absolutemagnitude of the effect, precision of the estimates of theeffects and costs of interventions, the committee madeeither Strong or Weak recommendations.o A strong recommendation in favor of anintervention reflects that the desirable effects ofadherence to a recommendation will clearlyoutweigh the undesirable effects.oA weak recommendation in favor of an interventionindicates that the desirable effects of adherence toa recommendation probably will outweigh theundesirable effects, but the panel is not confidentabout these tradeoffs.75