Locating sex-specific evidence on clinical questions in MEDLINE: a search filter for use on OvidSP？

A filter was developed by screening titles, abstracts and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in a set of 80 high quality and relevant papers, 75 of which were identified through a review of clinical guidelines and five through other means. The filter, for use on OvidSP？, consists of nine command lines for searching free text words in the title, abstract and MeSH of a paper. It was able to identify 74/80 (92.5%) of the articles from which it was derived. The filter was evaluated in a set of 622 recently published original studies on Alzheimer's disease and on asthma. It was validated against a reference of 98 studies from this set, which provided high quality, clinically relevant, sex-specific evidence. Recall and precision were used as performance measures.The filter demonstrated 81/98 (83%) recall and 81/125 (65%) precision in retrieving relevant articles on Alzheimer's disease and on asthma. In comparison, only 30/98 (31%) recall would have been achieved if sex-specific MeSH terms only had been used.This sex-specific search filter performs well in retrieving relevant papers, while its precision rate is good. It performs better than a search with sex-specific MeSH. The filter can be useful to anyone seeking sex-specific clinical evidence (e.g., guideline organizations, researchers, medical educators, clinicians).Research-based evidence is an important foundation for clinical decision making. In the past, women have often been underrepresented among participants in clinical research [1-3]. Since the 1990s, however, health research funding organizations have taken initiatives to redress this bias, and researchers have begun to pay more attention to the equitable inclusion of men and women in clinical research and the analysis of the data according to sex [4-11]. This has led to a new body of published research data on differences between and among men and women in the aetiology, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of diseases [12-18]. These differences may be rooted in