Review for 10.1186/s12876-020-01516-4 (2020)

Reviewer’s report
Title: 
The Effects of Resistant Starches on Inflammatory Bowel Disease in
Preclinical and Clinical Settings: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Version: 
0 
Date: 
17 Jun 2020
Reviewer's report:
This group aimed to perform a systematic review and meta-analysis on the role
of dietary resistant starches (RS) on IBD; they had the ambitious goal of looking
at this across a very broad swath of studies. 
Overall the looked at 27 studies that
were very heterogeneous in nature; even when separating animal from human
studies, the aims, demographics, methods, statistics, and endpoints were
markedly different which made data synthesis challenging. 
While the group did
an admirable job collating the disparate data and reporting it with relevant
statistics when appropriate, it was hard to take home a meaningful summative
conclusions from this analysis. 
There was high bias and high heterogeneity that
made interpretation and generalizability problematic.
There were very interesting common threads that suggest benefit of RS in IBD
in the pre-clinical and human studies, from improved histology to changes in
microbiome to cytokine and SCFA changes to symptom improvement;
unfortunately, I did not find enough in common with the selected studies to find
combining them a helpful systematic review. 
I would suggest focusing on fewer
outcomes and analyses.
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