My bachelor thesis: Third week of thesis-writing

Three weeks into our thesis-writing for me and Cecilia. We came off to a slow start as our topic, weight cycling, is a difficult one. Yesterday we did as many as 30 searches in PubMed ( a database) and Scopus, looking for the perfect search words and the perfect combination. For our question, ‘what is the effect of weight cycling on blood pressure in obese and overweight subjects?’ We used “weight cycling” OR ” weight cycle” OR“weight fluctuations” AND “blood pressure” OR “hypertension” OR “hypotension”, ”normotensive” AND “obesity” OR “obese” OR “overweight”. After getting 43 search hits, we limited the search even further by choosing only human studies, adults >19 and this narrowed down the search to 18 studies, half of (9) which were useful to us. Today we are doing the following: Setting up further criteria’s: what is a weight cycle? How long and how much? How many required during the given period? Intentional or unintentional weight loss? Requirements for the subjects: blood pressure at start, healthy, no smoking, non-menopausal, no pregnancies during follow up, limited alcohol consumption, and so on. Afterwards we are going to go through the articles and pick out the ones we can use based on our selected criteria’s. Finally today, we are going to grade the articles according to GRADE. Pew! And we have only just started!

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Last modified on 2010-03-09