The practice of medicine was revolutionized in 1992 with the introduction of the concept of evidence-based medicine.¹ Since the advent of this movement, systematic reviews and meta-analyses not only have become popular but also have steered the development of clinical practice guidelines and supported justification of further research by granting agencies.² By summarizing available data and comparing the effectiveness of multiple treatment alternatives, systematic reviews provide a high level of evidence quality on the clinical benefits and harms of interventions, which is highly desired in health care decision-making. However, inconsistency in the quantification of an outcome across trials deters the pooled estimation of the measure of effect. This lack of outcome uniformity is evident in the literature pertaining to interventions for actinic keratosis, hindering cross-trial comparisons of treatments and the identification of the most effective therapies.

1992年，随着循证医学概念的引入，医学实践发生了革命性变化。¹自该运动问世以来，系统的评论和荟萃分析不仅广受欢迎，而且指导了临床实践指南的制定，并支持了资助机构进行进一步研究的理由。²通过总结可用数据并比较多种治疗方案的有效性，系统评价提供了有关干预措施的临床利弊的高质量证据，这在医疗保健决策中是非常需要的。然而，各试验结果量化的不一致阻碍了对效果量度的综合估计。这种缺乏结果统一性的证据在有关光化性角化病干预的文献中很明显，这阻碍了治疗的交叉试验比较和最有效疗法的鉴定。