Safeguarding WHO guideline recommendations through strengthened scientific integrity to advance global health

作者：Gitau Mburu, Nancy Santesso, Romina Brignardello‐Petersen, Cindy Farquhar, Richard H. Kennedy, James Kiarie · 发表于：Human Reproduction · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1093/humrep/deaf217 · 被引用次数：4 · 研究领域：Pharmaceutical Quality and Counterfeiting、Viral Infections and Outbreaks Research、Global Public Health Policies and Epidemiology

The release of the first WHO guidelines on prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of infertility (World Health Organization, 2025) is an important milestone in global public health, as infertility affects one in six people during their lifetime (World Health Organization, 2023). The guideline’s emphasis on evidence-based medicine is timely as the use of non-evidence-based interventions in medically assisted reproduction is common (van de Wiel et al., 2020). The guideline recommendations were formulated by a Guidelines Development Group (GDG) using the GRADE approach (World Health Organization, 2014). This approach entails assessing the balance of benefits and harms (at individual and population levels), certainty of evidence, values and preferences of patients and healthcare providers, resource requirements, cost-effectiveness, feasibility, and impact on equity of different interventions. Existing evidence was rigorously assessed through systematic application of GRADE methods (Schünemann et al., 2013). While all the GRADE domains were considered, there was an additional concern: falsified data. The risk of falsified data has become a critical consideration when assessing the evidence for guideline recommendations. This is because there has been a rise in the number of retracted articles in reproductive medicine (Minetto et al., 2023), as well as other biomedical fields (Hesselmann et al., 2017). Biomedical article retractions have quadrupled over the last two decades, from 10....