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). |