clinical research questions

According to the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM), "one of the fundamental skills required for practising EBM is the asking of well-built clinical questions. To benefit patients and clinicians, such questions need to be both directly relevant to patients' problems and phrased in ways that direct your search to relevant and precise answers."

Different types of clinical questions are suited to different syntaxes and phrasings, but all will clearly define the PICO elements. The definitions and frames below may be helpful for organizing your question: Intervention/Therapy. Questions addressing how a clinical issue, illness, or disability is treated.

Examples of broad clinical research questions include: Does the administration of pain medication at time of surgical incision reduce the need for pain medication twenty-four hours after surgery? What maternal factors are associated with obesity in toddlers? What elements of a peer support intervention prevent suicide in high school females?

A clinical trial is a research study that involves people like you. Researchers conduct clinical trials to find new or better ways to prevent, detect, or treat health conditions. Often, researchers want to find out if a new test, treatment, or preventive measure is safe and effective. Tests can include ways to screen for, diagnose, or prevent a ...

Focusing on the primary research question. The process of developing a new idea usually stems from a dilemma inherent to the clinical practice.[2,3,4] However, once the problem has been identified, it is tempting to formulate multiple research questions. Conducting a clinical trial with more than one primary study question would not be feasible.

If searching for evidence provides no answer, you could propose your own research to answer the question. This paper presents the initial steps for those interested in pursuing EBM. We have provided guidance and examples to help with developing a focused clinical question and finding the highest level of research to answer the question.

A well-formulated research question needs extreme specificity and preciseness which guides the implementation of the project keeping in mind the identification of variables and population of interest. Here we will present a clinical scenario and see how clinical questions arise and help us in finding the evidence to answer our question.

When weighing the risks of research, you can consider two important factors: 1. the chance of any harm occurring, and. 2. the degree of harm that could result from participating in the study. Most clinical studies pose the risk of minor discomfort, which lasts only a short time.

Standards and methods for clinical research in surgery have become more accepted and expected in the last 10 yr than they were in the past. 1 Although neurosurgery has been responsible for some randomized, surgical trials with clearly defined outcome measures and clear clinical questions, 2-6 the surgical case series is still the most common clinical research method in the surgical literature.

To begin to develop and narrow a clinical research question it is advisable to craft an answerable question that begins and ends with a patient, population, or problem. These are the beginnings of not only developing an answerable EBP question, but also using the PICO process for developing well-built searchable and answerable clinical questions.