Protocol for a scoping review of outcomes in clinical studies of interventions for venous thromboembolism in adults

INTRODUCTION: Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a common, potentially fatal yet treatable disease. Several advances in treatment of VTE have been made over the past decades, but definition and reporting of outcomes across those studies are inconsistent. Development of an international core outcome set for clinical studies of interventions for VTE addresses this lack of standardisation. The first step in the development of a core outcome set is to conduct a scoping review which aims to generate an inclusive list of unique outcomes that have been reported in previous studies. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: MEDLINE, Embase and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials will be searched with no language restriction for prospective studies reporting on interventions for treatment of VTE in patients who are adult and non-pregnant. Records will be sorted in reverse chronological order. Study screening and data extraction will be independently performed by two authors in blocks based on date of publication, starting with 2015 to 2020 and subsequent 1-year periods, until no new outcome measures are identified from the set of included studies. After homogenising spelling and combining outcomes with the same meaning, a list of unique outcomes will be determined. Those outcomes will be grouped into outcome domains. Qualitative analysis and descriptive statistics will be used to report results. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Ethical approval is not required for this study. The results of this scoping review will be presented at scientific conferences, published in a peer-reviewed journal, and they will provide candidate outcome domains to be considered in subsequent steps in the development of a core outcome set for clinical studies of interventions for VTE. PROTOCOL REGISTRATION DETAILS: http://hdl.handle.net/10393/40459.