PBL Information Resources and Tools for the First Year: Case 14: Mr. Russell - #1 - Just a Little Hematuria

The following are textbooks of possible interest and are available either in print or online.  To find more books of interest, search the catalog.

Knowing who might be a big player in providing a certain type of information can help with a Google search. 

For example, need health stats?  Most likely the CDC has them. 

For the PKD, you might be looking for genetic info.  A big source of very credible information is the folks at NCBI (you might notice that PubMed is also from the NCBI group).  

In Google, enter your search terms but also include  NCBI.  

United States Renal Data System (USRDS)

Thanks to Dr. Rifkin for suggesting this resource.

USRDS is a national organization (funded by NIDDK) that collects, analyzes, and distributes information about end-stage renal disease (ESRD) in the United States. They also collaborate with members of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), and the ESRD networks, sharing datasets and actively working to improve the accuracy of ESRD patient information.

Find the statistics for incidence or prevalence - by state or whole US.  Get numbers by diagnosis too.  The site requires a quick registration to use their query tool, but it provides some great data for you to use in a number of different ways.

Free Resources to Know for Life Beyond UCSD

The following resources are available to everyone without a subscription and for the most part have been developed with government funding.  These tools will be available to you even when you graduate and move on from UCSD. 

Synthesized Resources

I figure these are some of your favorite go-to resources and for this week's topics you will find some good info in both Up to Date and Medscape.  If you want the brief details on CKD - epidemiology, treatment/management, etc. Medscape's display is nice and clear.

National organizations

The following are some of the key government and private organizations.  National organizations often have very useful information for patients as well as physicians. 

PubMed Search Tips

A debate I had with myself is the best way to suggest looking for information on coping & spirituality.  PubMed and PsycINFO are great tools for this topic and there are so many different ways to get at this literature, however, it is not a straight forward easy search to find really good stuff.  I think a combined search - one with a little finness and then letting the system do its magic - is the best approach here.  Here's what I mean.

Similar Articles

For this type of search to work well, start with a really good article.  So, if you don't already have a really good article, how do you find one on this specific topic without having to wade through lots of articles?  On to the next step.

A Title Search

There are times when having a word in the title can help you identify highly pertinent articles.  It has it drawbacks, but in this case, would be very helpful.  Because I want to find a highly pertinent article, I want to let PubMed know what the most important word is.  One way to do that is to ask for it to appear in the title.

coping[ti] chronic illness kidney

spirituality[ti] chronic illness kidney

Find one that looks really good and to get more like it, click on similar citations.  You may want to check the related citations for a couple of different articles because the results will be different.  This type of search uses the uniqueness of the words in the title, abstract, & other areas and find articles like it.

PubMed Search Tip -- Getting the "Bigger Picture" articles

Sometimes PubMed has some good articles that are a slice of the information you need, so you might need several articles to make your point.  That is okay.  However, sometimes it is helpful to find those articles that do a little sythesis for you.  That's where the Review articles, Systematic Reviews, & Meta Analysis types of articles come in handy.

From the filters on the side,look at "Article Type" and click on Review.  To find the other options, click on the more just under the Article Type filter to bring up the list of options.  Find Meta Analysis & Systematic Review.  Click in the box next to them and click on the button "show".  After this, you can select it just like you did the Review type - and you can have all 3 at the same time.

PsycINFO

PsycINFO is the key psychiatry database.  It also covers the psychological aspects of medicine and health.  It goes beyond just journal articles and indexes books, book chapters, doctoral thesis, and even web sites.

To get a few more results than PubMed offers, PsycINFO is a great place to search for articles on the psychological issues of a organ donation and  transplatation.  Try the following steps to retrieve a set of highly relevent articles.

In PsycINFO:

• Choose your terms
• Scan articles for one that seems very much on topic and look at the "Descriptors" for any good ones to help Narrow your results
  • Select one or two (probably two is best for this search) and use AND to combine them in a new search

Topics that might be good in this database include:

• Chronic disease or more specifically, chronic kidney disease
• Coping, spirituality
• Organ donation, or living donation
• Organ transplantation
• Other psychology related topics

This would be a great place to find more information designed for patients about nutrition.