[Support in diagnostics and therapy]

There is no proven effective treatment for many diseases today that proves to be one of the greatest problems of health care. Therefore, different therapeutic decisions are made in connection with the same disease by hospitals. There is a growing need for reviews which summarize the information collected from professional literature with scientific methods. The aim of the authors was to show the limitations of conventional narrative reviews, and to present the method and importance of systematic reviews to Hungarian professionals. Systematic reviews are transparent studies which are based on a predetermined protocol and collate all empirical evidence to answer a specific research question, and consequently provide more reliable results. They use explicit and systematic methods to minimize bias, and provide evidence for clinicians and policy makers to help them make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions which are essential in several fields of the health care system and health policy, too.