How often are the Consensus and State-of-the-Science Statements reviewed?
The statements are not reviewed once they are released in their final form. It is important to recognize that each Consensus or State-of-the-Science statement reflects an independent panel’s assessment of the medical knowledge available at the time the statement was written; as such, it provides a “snapshot in time” of the state of knowledge on the conference topic. In the period following a statement’s release, new knowledge is inevitably accumulating through medical research. For this reason, statements more than five years old are deemed “historical,” as information contained in them is likely to be out of date. Historical statements may continue to be useful to the research community as a reference for understanding what was known about a topic at a particular point in time, including whether gaps in research identified at the time of each conference have since been filled. It is for this purpose that historical conference statements will remain available on-line indefinitely, but
