Statement to an Insufficient Systematic Review on Viscum album L. Therapy

Table 1

Corrections as to risk of bias assessment.

	Issue	Relevant studies	Risk	Review’s assessment [21]	Corrected evaluation according to Cochrane Handbook
A	Erroneous assessment of risk of bias of “random sequence generation (RSQ)	[36–41]	Random sequence generation	High risk	Low risk
B	Erroneous assessment of risk of bias of “allocation concealment” in six studies	[36–41]	Premature knowledge of allocation	High risk	Low risk
C	Erroneous assessment of risk of bias of “incomplete outcome data”	[42–46]	Incomplete outcome data	High risk	High risk of bias is not justified
D1	Inconsistent evaluation of risk of bias between studies with the same risk	[47] vs. [48]	Allocation concealment	Low risk, for a study with no advantage of mistletoe [47] vs. high risk, for a study with advantage of mistletoe [48]	Equal assessment of risks
D2	Inconsistent evaluation of risk of bias between studies with the same risk	[47] vs. [44]	Incomplete outcome data	Low risk, for a study with no advantage of mistletoe [47] vs. high risk, for a study with advantage of mistletoe [44]	Equal assessment of risks
E1	Erroneous assessment of risk of bias of “other sources of bias”	[47]	Other source of bias	Low risk, for a study with no advantage of mistletoe	High risk, as essential criticism has been published [49] towards the Kleeberg publication
E2	Erroneous assessment of risk of bias of “other sources of bias”	[45, 50, 51]	Other source of bias	High risk	Low risk, a in two of the studies [45, 50] significant results were evaluated
E3	Erroneous assessment of risk of bias of “other sources of bias”	“at least 16 studies”	Other source of bias	Unclear risk	Low risk, as “bad reporting quality” is not a defined criterion for assessing the risk of bias according to the Cochrane Handbook
E4	Erroneous assessment of risk of bias of “other sources of bias”		Other source of bias	High risk	Low risk, as a “multiple testing problem” is not attributable to this study as the only primary endpoint “overall survival” has been proven in a confirmatory test
E5	Erroneous assessment of risk of bias of “other sources of bias”	[52]	Other source of bias	High risk	Low risk, as the individual best supportive care was described in this study

Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Review of Interventions [26].