Sex and Race Representation in Temporal Bone Histopathology Studies in the United States: A Systematic Review.

Titles and abstracts were screened by one author only, so a study missed at that stage stayed missed. Thirty-four otherwise eligible papers could not be read in full and were excluded, so the picture drawn here may be incomplete. Studies that did report race did not say how that information was obtained, so the authors could not check how it was recorded. The same temporal bone specimens may appear in more than one study from the same research group, so the specimen counts are not strictly counts of separate people. Race was reported by so few studies (5%) that further analysis was not possible, and no study reported ethnicity at all. No risk-of-bias assessment was performed, because the review was describing who was in the studies rather than testing a treatment. It is not known how far the published studies represent all the specimens held by the National Temporal Bone, Hearing and Balance Pathology Resource Registry. Whether donor sex and race were recorded at the time the temporal bones were collected is unknown.

The text supplied contains no funding or conflict-of-interest statement for the review itself. It reports that of the 12 included studies that gave full race data, 7 were not funded or did not list a funding source, 4 were funded by non-profit and government agencies, and 1 solely by a government agency.

Do not conclude that temporal bone donors were overwhelmingly White. Almost all of these studies (285 of 300) never reported race at all, so for those studies the donors' demographics are simply unknown. The evidence of underrepresentation comes only from the 12 studies that did report it.