Assessing the perceived quality of brachial artery Flow Mediated Dilation studies for inclusion in meta-analyses and systematic reviews: Description of data employed in the development of a scoring ;tool based on currently accepted guidelines

Abstract

Brachial artery Flow Mediated Dilation (FMD) is widely used as a non-invasive measure of endothelial function. Adherence to expert consensus guidelines on FMD measurement has been found to be of vital importance to obtain reproducible data. This article lists the literature data which was considered in the development of a tool to aid in the objective judgement of the extent to which published studies adhered to expert guidelines for FMD measurement. Application of this tool in a systematic review of FMD studies (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2016.03.011) (Greyling et al., 2016 [1]) indicated that adherence to expert consensus guidelines is strongly correlated to the reproducibility of FMD data. Keywords: Cardiovascular disease, Atherosclerosis, Endothelial function, Reproducibility, Methodology