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Table 2 Minimum criteria for stating “GRADE is used”

From: Policy for developing clinical practice guidelines of Japanese Society for Dialysis Therapy

GRADE is an outcome-specific rating of confidence (a body of evidence, not an individual study).

“Quality of evidence” should be defined consistently with one of the two definitions (for guidelines or for systematic reviews) used by the GRADE Working Group.

Explicit consideration should be given to each of the GRADE criteria for assessing the quality of evidence.

The overall quality of evidence should be assessed for each important outcome and expressed using four categories (“high,” “moderate,” “low,” and “very low”).

Evidence summaries (narrative or tabular) should be used as the basis for judgments about the quality of evidence and the strength of recommendations.

Explicit consideration should be given to each of the GRADE criteria for assessing the strength of a recommendation.

The strength of recommendations should be expressed using two categories (weak/conditional and strong) for or against a management option, and the definitions for each category should be consistent with those used by the GRADE Working Group.

Decisions about the strength of the recommendations should ideally be transparently reported (e.g.. GRADE grid).

  1. Each element was arranged expression from Ref. [8, 10]
  2. Abbreviation: GRADE the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation