This year marks another exciting

This year marks another exciting new beginning for . Changes include not only new Editors but also the appointment of new members from France, Germany, Japan, Korea and USA for the Journal\'s International Advisory Board and Editorial Board. They will play an important role in contributing to the development of and soliciting more articles from international researchers, leading to the maximum possible dissemination and recognition of articles within the scientific community.
Introduction Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has become a hot topic in medical practice, education, and research. However, a large number of senior doctors did not have an opportunity to learn EBM in medical schools. The idea of using the evidence for medical practice could be traced back to the time of ancient Greece. However, it was not until the postwar cyclobenzaprine hydrochloride that EBM began to appear in modern medicine. Archibald L. (Archie) Cochrane (1909–1988), a British clinical epidemiologist, was the first to advocate the principle of EBM. In his most celebrated book entitled “Effectiveness and Efficiency. Random Reflections on Health Services,” he proposed that the health-care resources are always limited and should be “efficiently” utilized based on evidence to provide “effective” health care to as many people as possible. The best evidence of the effectiveness of interventions is from randomized controlled trials (RCTs). The same principle applies not only to treatments, but also to diagnostic tests and screening procedures. Inspired by Archie Cochrane, the academic centers in the UK and Canada, in particular the Universities of Oxford and York in England and McMaster University in Ontario (Canada), established the explicit systematic methods to obtain the “best evidence.” One of the most important methods of acquiring the best evidence is meta-analysis, i.e., using a statistical method to obtain a pooled intervention effect estimate from independent RCTs of adequate quality to minimize biases and random error. In 1904, Karl Pearson, a British pioneer statistician, first proposed to combine the results of individual studies to minimize random errors. In 1920s, Ronald Fisher, another renowned British statistician, developed a statistical method of meta-analysis which is known as Fisher\'s combined probability test. Gene Glass, an American statistician, coined the term “meta-analysis” and illustrated its use in 1976. Sir Iain Chamlers, a pioneer in EBM, was the first to employ meta-analysis in clinical medicine successfully. In 1990, his group based in Oxford published the most famous meta-analysis entitled “The effects of corticosteroid administration before preterm delivery: an overview of the evidence from controlled trials.” By 1989, there had been seven RCTs examining the effects of prenatal administration of corticosteroid to women who were about to give birth prematurely. However, none of the studies had adequate power to conclude the effects of corticosteroid on infant mortality. Sir Iain Chamlers conducted a meta-analysis and found that a short, inexpensive course of corticosteroids given to these women could prevent infant respiratory distress syndrome and reduce the odds of the babies of these women dying from the complications of immaturity by 30–50%. Because no relevant meta-analysis had been published until 1989, most obstetricians did not realize that Back mutation simple treatment was so effective. Tens of thousands of premature babies might thus have died unnecessarily. This is just one of many examples of loss of lives resulting from failure to perform up-to-date systematic reviews (SRs) of RCTs of health care. In the meantime, the McMaster University group led by Professors Gordon Guyatt and David Sackett in Canada advocated the EBM paradigm for medical practice and education. They officially announced the term “EBM” in their article published in 1992, and defined EBM as “the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making clinical decisions about the care of individual patients.”