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Cervical and Vaginal Deciduosis: Insights on Management and a Systematic Review… Experience in Writing It.

From 1957 on PubMed to Distinct Revision & Thoughts

December 13, 2023

Author: Zoryana Bolgarina, M.D.

As previously, we are sharing our experience from…

The review idea’s applicability:

It satisfies interest in wanting to understand nosology’s clinical features, detect patterns, and generate new hypotheses, especially on rare or relatively rare conditions.

This time, we provide sequential pros and cons descriptive summary plus convince you that anyone can* write a systematic review – all you need is obtain precise instructions and explanations in addition to knowing English at least at a level that allows you to comprehend the information you are looking for.

At first, this type of systematic review may attract a writer by its search strategy simplicity. Trying to develop a complex search request combining more than two concepts threatens the result’s integrity by potentially causing a crucial loss of relevant articles. However, this lucky feature is counterbalanced by complicated and time-consuming data extraction (it depends on the narrowness of a research question) as well as risk of bias assessment processes. In the presented review, we spent plenty of time addressing missed data and organizing all data into three tables more than 20 times. We found it a special challenge when the focus is directed to an analysis of pregnancy management that needs to be adjusted based on the urgency of conditions, term of gestation, and maternal-fetal state. Our winning solution was to categorize pregnancies as managed expectantly or actively. In addition, if an initial research question is broad, brainstorming differential diagnoses in selecting variables, saving some space for unexpected findings, may help – this is exactly what worked out in completing the tables in our example. There are a few useful sources:

  1. Uncommon research question formats, including PICo (Population, Phenomena of Interest, Context), PPO (Patients, Prognostic factors, Outcomes), etc.
  2. Well-presented similar review example, such as “Incarcerated gravid uterus – A systematic review” published by Narayanamoorthy et al. (2023).
  3. The resources on risk of bias assessment published by Murad et al. (2018) and the Joanna Briggs Institute critical appraisal tools.

After this overwhelming step, follow a relatively relaxing but responsible step – descriptive and, if possible, inference statistics. Handling missed data by applying simple methods (e.g., available case principle) is quite logical, although having a statistical package could prevent miscalculations, as, for example, the author encountered.

Finally, writing the review’s discussion and conclusion sections was the most manageable step, as their consequent diagnostic and therapeutic presentation reflect clinicians’ perceptions of information. Here, we got quick guidance from Quintero-Martinez et al. (2022). Still, we noted trickiness in writing these sections. Specifically, they require thoughtfulness to combine various findings of separately presented cases and to apply the fourth Hemingway’s rule describing tactfully reported complications. 
*It was my first experience in writing a systematic review. My supporters were me and MD Anderson Cancer Center’s website resources.

The links (including citations) are attached.

(c) 2023 Bolgarina Zoryana. All rights reserved.