Initiative of Women's Health Innovations LLC

Before proceeding to the review’s history…

In our case, we had to find the solution to turn unfeasible and unethical struggles of clinical trials focused on investigations of cranberry supplements’ outcomes in pregnant women into an effective research question that follows the PICOT format (Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome, Time frame) and FINER criteria (Feasible, Interesting, Novel, Ethical, Relevant). Reviewing the clinical trials’ articles in-depth following the SPIRIT (Standard Protocol Items: Recommendations for Interventional Trials) statement checklist and explanations, important directions in studying the intervention both in pregnant and non-pregnant women were discovered.

The review’s story started on July 29, 2023, when WP’s idea of designing a placebo-controlled randomized clinical trial (evaluating the efficacy of daily 72 mg of proanthocyanidins extract supplementation in pregnant women with recurrent urinary tract infection on preventing urinary tract infection in time-to-event analysis) won the voting with the preplanned result and, as the voting consequence, forced the reviews’ author’s (Zoryana Bolgarina) choice of its topic in a closely related direction. Now, it seems a recently published systematic review with meta-analysis by the Cochrane Group (2023) was fate’s time point in creating this beauty, as we had to convey a different focus rather than solely evaluating cranberry supplements’ efficacy and safety in pregnant women. Therefore, we targeted the studies’ core, analyzing (1) the PICO and PECO (Population, Exposure, Comparator, Outcome) research questions’ components, (2) the studies’ feasibility, and (3) the intervention’s efficacy, side effects and safety, extending the reviews’ eligibility criteria from clinical trials to observation studies included and exploring all pertinent parts in detail.

The next challenge was to involve our readers, presenting thoughts in condensed mode or, as Modesitt et al. (2022) called it, ‘Hemingway’s economical and direct literary style’ to write the article ‘like a pro’ and publish it ‘like a boss.’ To achieve the goal, we learned from Forbes et al. (2019), reflecting on their methods and results sections’ structure, and Orsmond et al. (2015), reflecting on their Appendix’ objectives and questions to create the review’ discussion section, filling the systematic review with scrutinized results of our analysis, intervening our thoughts with other studies, and discovering several knowledge gaps along the process.

The links (including citations) are attached.

(c) 2023 Bolgarina Zoryana. All rights reserved.