USING ELEMENTS OF THERAPY HEDGES

Is your clinical question a THERAPY question?

Incorporate elements of a therapy hedge into your search. By using combinations of subject headings, subheadings, and keywords, you will retrieve clinical trials, multicenter studies, comparative studies, or double-blinded studies that have evaluated the efficacy of certain therapies.

Recommended Therapy Subject Headings

Clinical Protocols
Feasibility Studies
Pilot Projects
Reproducibility of Results
Research Design
Double-blind method
Patient Selection
Random Allocation
Clinical Protocols
Sample Size
Comparative Study
Placebos

Recommended Therapy Subheadings (attach to subject)

drug therapy (dt)
therapeutic use (tu)

Recommended Therapy Keyword Searches Try entering these combinations on the "enter keyword" line:

  1. (clinical or control$ or compar$) adj (trial$ or study or studies).ti,ab,sh.
  2. (multicenter$ or multicentre$ or multi-centre$ or multi-center$).ti,ab,sh.
  3. (blind$ or mask$ or placebo$).ti,ab,sh.
  4. 1 or 2 or 3

The .ti,ab,sh. that you see above indicate that you are looking for these words in the titles (ti) , abstracts (ab), or subject headings (sh) of the articles. The $ indicates a wild card character or truncation. The adj indicates adjacency, or tells the system that you want these words to be next to one another.


THERAPY HEDGE EXAMPLE:

This strategy will filter the articles on using anticoagulants in patients with atrial fibrillation, retrieved in search statement 3, to those articles that contain evidence-based information essential to deciding whether or not to prescribe an anticoagulant for a patient with atrial fibrillation.

# Search History Results Comments
1 exp *anticoagulants/tu 1734 Notice the use of the /tu (therapeutic use) subheading
2 exp atrial fibrillation/dt 644 Notice the use of the /dt (drug therapy) subheading
3 1 and 2 123
4 (clinical or control$ or compar$) adj (trial$ or study or studies).ti,ab,sh. 44025
5 3 and 4 16 When we combine the results of sets #3 and #4, we find 16 articles that include keywords indicating that trials/studies are reported.
6 (multicenter$ or multicentre$ or multi-centre$ or multi-center$).ti,ab,sh. 8800
7 3 and 6 6 When we combine the results of sets #3 and #6, we find 6 articles that include keywords indicating that multicenter studies are reported.
8 (blind$ or mask$ or placebo$).ti,ab,sh. 30124
9 3 and 8 7 When we combine the results of sets #3 and #8, we find 7 articles that include keywords indicating that double-blind method, or placebos are reported.

Instead of using keywords, you can also try using the "Placebos" and "Double-blind method" subject headings.
10 5 or 7 or 9 23 Combining #5 or #7 or #9 simply groups the results of our three searches into one set containing a total of 23 articles.

As you can see, there is no one perfect way to apply elements of a therapy hedge to your search. Once again, you should try various combinations of subject headings, subheadings, and keywords, in a step-by-step building process.

Let's move on to the DIAGNOSIS hedge.