In March 2024 we posted a blog about one of our new projects at NESSIE – a systematic review looking at the use of exercise for people with existing vascular disease.  We have been making good progress with the review so wanted to provide an update on the work we are doing.

When conducting a systematic review, a protocol or plan of the review is normally published in advance. This lets other researchers know that a review is in progress to avoid duplication of effort and publishes the methods you plan to use. Making your methods available to view increases the transparency of the work and helps reduce bias.   You can access our protocol here.

What progress have we made?

We have completed our searches of five existing Cochrane systematic reviews as well as six electronic databases and trial registries. This search generated over 34,600 results (called reports) which were transferred into a platform called Covidence, which is specialist software used for conducting systematic reviews.

We are now in the process of screening these reports to check if they meet our inclusion criteria. Initially, this is completed for the title and summary or abstract of each report (if available). This allows the systematic review team to quickly exclude reports which are not relevant (based on the criteria described in the protocol). Reports which might be relevant move into the next stage where we will check them in more detail by reading the full version. Whilst this may sound quite straightforward it normally requires piloting to ensure the review team are all interpreting the criteria in the same way. To help make sure that we are consistent in our approach we meet every week to chat about our progress and discuss results we are not sure about. At this stage, it is important that we involve other stakeholders in this process such as clinicians working in the NHS.

Role of Clinical Staff

Involving clinical staff in decision-making helps ensure the right type of studies are being included in the review.  For this review clinical staff have advised what kind of exercises the review should focus on, for example, the use of breathing exercises would not help to answer our research question so have been excluded.

We will be using this blog site to keep you updated on the progress of this review (and our other work) so why not subscribe to our blog by leaving your details on the right-hand side of the page.

Blog by Dr Katie Thomson

Update on Exercise for people with existing vascular disease as a tool for secondary prevention / NESSIE - NIHR Evidence Synthesis Scotland InitiativE by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0