Abstract

Background. We assessed the abstracts of the IXth Congress of the Middle East Society for Organ Transplantation (MESOT) held December 6 to 10, 2004, in Ankara, Turkey. Methods. Assessment was done with a 19-item quality assessment checklist, which was developed by Timmer et al (2003) with a good interrater agreement (intraclass coefficient 0.61 to 0.81). From the total 396 Congress abstracts, cluster random sampling was applied to select abstracts from oral and poster presentations. We assessed 109 abstracts, by recording presentation type, study type, country of study, number of authors, and transplantation type. We also evaluated study design and obtained a final quality score for each sample. Evaluation of the abstracts was performed by a single investigator. Results. The mean (SD) quality score of all abstracts was 0.60 +/- 0.11 (range: 0.33 to 0.81). More than 80 had a score above 0.50. Human observational studies showed higher scores compared with human and basic interventional studies (P =.001). Other variables showed no association with quality scores. The strongest parts of the abstracts were the appropriateness of the subjects and a sufficient description of them. The weakest parts of abstracts for common items were characteristic of subjects, method of selection, and sufficient detail of results. Conclusion. Overall, the quality of the abstracts presented at the IXth MESOT congress was acceptable. However, according to our study, better description of the subjects, their method of selection, and detailed report of the results would improve their quality.