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pharming_in_korea As mentioned earlier, we were assigned to do a systematic review (SR). Just to outline, we are supposed to pick a topic, find clinical trials on said topic and well, simply put, write a systematic review on the topic. We've been working on this for about a week now; yet we've barely been able to find any viable topics.
That's not to say we haven't been working on it. We have! Extensively. Most of all the hours of our afternoons in the past week have been spent working on this SR project. So it's a little disappointing that I'm writing this now, saying we haven't gotten anywhere. This is because this first step is actually the hardest for us. I think researchers do not write systematic reviews because they are struck with a sudden desire to randomly write a systematic review - on a topic, any topic! They do this because I believe they were searching on a specific topic of interest in a field they have knowledge on, and they are either aware (or made aware through their searches) of a lack of a systematic review/meta-analyses on a certain topic and thus decide to fill this gap OR they realize a certain topic is popular and has a lot of controversial data out. Let me remind you, we are definitely not researchers, nor do we have this breadth of knowledge I just described. Thus finding a topic is a little more difficult for us.
We started by just searching through topics of interest to us. We looked through some heme-onc and chronic kidney disease topics, because that is the specialty of the service we were on. We asked some of our preceptors for some guidance too. Myself in particular, I am interested in the psychiatric side of pharmacy so I combed through some of the topics I found interesting: addictions, methadone maintenance program, illicit drug use, schizophrenia, depression and PTSD. We went back and asked some of our old professors/preceptors from UCSF. We looked through our previous projects, including our drug consult papers from rotations, and we considered questions we've been asked by doctors in our prior rotations. Alas, anything we came up with has already had a SR done recently. Either that or there was not enough evidence available to write a SR - just 1-2 studies.
But we finally had a good lead when we thought about our monograph project from the previous year! We pulled up the list of "new" drugs (or old drugs with new indications) and combed through Pubmed. Surprisingly, many of them already did have SRs, even if they were only released/approved in the last year or so! (Man, people are fast!) Still, there were a few drugs on that list that have some clinical trials and that do not have a SR written on them yet. Most likely, we will end up choosing one of these drugs to write a SR on.
Right now, we are in the processes of reviewing the topics that did not already have a SR written. We will look through what topics we have left and search to see how many clinical trials each topic has and whether these trials can be grouped together for some conclusion or consensus for our SR. From this, we will pick whichever topic looks the best to write a SR on. Hopefully by the end of today, we will have a topic chosen so we can move onto the next step of writing a SR!
-Lena
That's not to say we haven't been working on it. We have! Extensively. Most of all the hours of our afternoons in the past week have been spent working on this SR project. So it's a little disappointing that I'm writing this now, saying we haven't gotten anywhere. This is because this first step is actually the hardest for us. I think researchers do not write systematic reviews because they are struck with a sudden desire to randomly write a systematic review - on a topic, any topic! They do this because I believe they were searching on a specific topic of interest in a field they have knowledge on, and they are either aware (or made aware through their searches) of a lack of a systematic review/meta-analyses on a certain topic and thus decide to fill this gap OR they realize a certain topic is popular and has a lot of controversial data out. Let me remind you, we are definitely not researchers, nor do we have this breadth of knowledge I just described. Thus finding a topic is a little more difficult for us.
We started by just searching through topics of interest to us. We looked through some heme-onc and chronic kidney disease topics, because that is the specialty of the service we were on. We asked some of our preceptors for some guidance too. Myself in particular, I am interested in the psychiatric side of pharmacy so I combed through some of the topics I found interesting: addictions, methadone maintenance program, illicit drug use, schizophrenia, depression and PTSD. We went back and asked some of our old professors/preceptors from UCSF. We looked through our previous projects, including our drug consult papers from rotations, and we considered questions we've been asked by doctors in our prior rotations. Alas, anything we came up with has already had a SR done recently. Either that or there was not enough evidence available to write a SR - just 1-2 studies.
But we finally had a good lead when we thought about our monograph project from the previous year! We pulled up the list of "new" drugs (or old drugs with new indications) and combed through Pubmed. Surprisingly, many of them already did have SRs, even if they were only released/approved in the last year or so! (Man, people are fast!) Still, there were a few drugs on that list that have some clinical trials and that do not have a SR written on them yet. Most likely, we will end up choosing one of these drugs to write a SR on.
Right now, we are in the processes of reviewing the topics that did not already have a SR written. We will look through what topics we have left and search to see how many clinical trials each topic has and whether these trials can be grouped together for some conclusion or consensus for our SR. From this, we will pick whichever topic looks the best to write a SR on. Hopefully by the end of today, we will have a topic chosen so we can move onto the next step of writing a SR!
-Lena
