As you can see, the evidence profilel lists both the certainty assessment and the summary of findings. So what do you do with it?
Describe the table. What are the most striking feature of this table?
- First, the certainty of the quality of evidence in support of whether mindfulness helps in relief of anxiety as from these two studies is low to very low. Hence, we would definitely need more evidence in support of whether mindfulness helps or does not help in relieving anxiety; based on only these pieces of evidence will not help us in any way.
- Second, overall, in general, the point estimates do seem to point that mindfulness meditation based approaches seem to reduce anxiety states. However, the absolute changes in anxiety scores seem to be low with large studies (expected) and some findings suggest the effect may even be large.
So overall, based only on these two pieces of evidence, we cannot say that mindfulness meditation has led to definite improvement in anxiety states, althought that may seem to be the case. More studies are needed that are of higher quality before a definite conclusion can be reached. Let's see what conclusions we reach when we supplement this evidence with addtional data of meta-analysis that we will conduct on the remaining three studies.