I don’t think anyone has mentioned GRADE yet in this topic (may be wrong - I haven’t read through the whole thing). I’m ambivalent about it. Personally I don’t find language statments particularly useful - I’d rather look at the numbers - but other people don’t share that view. I’m interested in what people think about their recommended statements, which have been largely adopted by Cochrane, so are being seen by a lot of people.
Described in this paper:
I find some of them a bit problematic. For example, I don’t like using the word “probably” when we aren’t talking about probabilities. The biggest issue I have found is more in the way they are getting used; I’m seeing a lot of meta-analysis results with wide 95% confidence intervals (basically compatible with major harm and major benefit) described (using the GRADE system) as “probably makes little or no difference” which seems to me completely misleading.
Interested in thoughts on GRADE anyway.