The Cochrane Collaboration
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The Cochrane Collaboration is a global network of dedicated volunteers, supported by a small staff. We rely on grants and donations (see our funders), and don't accept conflicted funding. You can help too. Work with us or help financially or be a consumer representative in the Consumer Network (ccnet)


One of the best things about the reviews is that the scientists scrutinize each individual study they include for bias and methodological weaknesses, which means their assessments do much more than count how many studies give some drug a thumbs up and how many a thumbs down. With this rigorous approach, Cochrane has reached conclusions about hundreds of treatments. In 2006, it found that giving women at risk of preterm birth a single course of corticosteroids speeds up fetal lung development and "should be considered routine for preterm delivery" in order to "reduce the number of babies who die or suffer breathing problems at birth." Other reviews, all collected in the Cochrane Library, have found that remaining upright during the first stage of labor can reduce labor by an hour, that weight-loss surgery is more effective than other strategies for shedding pounds but may not be safe, that statins given to the elderly do not reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s or other dementias, that using chest X-rays to detect lung cancer in people with no symptoms doesn’t affect whether they survive and may increase mortality and that Echinacea doesn’t get rid of a cold any faster than doing nothing.