Banner Health FAQs

Dear Patron,

I can understand your frustration. This is a large topic and probably needs a little more focus to be a manageable topic. I would like to teach you a few search tips in PubMed to help you. I recommend PubMed because it is free and will be available to you throughout your professional life no matter where you work. 

In PubMed, like all research databases there are Filters (or Limiters). You can limit to age, gender, species, study type, language, years of publication, etc.

Secondly, research databases use Subjects (or a Thesaurus or controlled vocabulary) to bring together similar articles. This helps to eliminate variation in word choice by the author.  You don't have to guess if it should be OBESE OR OBESITY.  Once you have identified the subjects, you can use subject qualifiers to focus even more. An example of a qualifier would be, mortality; surgery; prevention and control; drug therapy; diet therapy. You can see by adding any of these qualifiers to the subject Obesity that you would get more focus results. 

Third and final...All research databases use Boolean operators. You can combine searches with AND; OR; NOT. All databases include a history of your searches some retain them for an hour others like PubMed for eight hours. 

Here is the link for PubMed Medical Subject Headings (MESH) <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/>

• Search for obesity
• Search for weight gain
• Once you have chosen the subject and qualifier to you add then to the search builder and Search in Pubmed <see screen image>
• Repeat this process until you have all the relevant subjects

Return to PubMed <www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed>, and just below the search box you can see the word ADVANCED. Your search history is listed on the advanced screen. 

• Use the ... three dots to Add Query <screen image> and then add the next search with a Boolean operator <screen image>.
• Alternatively you can look at the results of the search again by clicking on the RESULTS number

Once you have a list of results that look more or less on topic, use the Filters to narrow the results. Not all of the filters are visible. Scroll to the bottom of the Filter list to find ADDITIONAL FILTERS. Chose the all the filters which you would like to use.

In your request, you wanted an intervention that is successful. And this may be the pain point you discovered. What is success; is it weeks, months, years or is it going from obese to overweight or is it never becoming obese which implies children or is it reducing weight gain? A successful therapy in medicine means it has been tested and retested repeatedly and then all the research analyzed together, i.e. a systematic review or meta-analysis (PubMed filter under study type). An intervention, to me, means that you are looking for a controlled clinical trial (PubMed filter under study type) or an evaluation study or comparative study. Are you interested in any specific type of intervention; diet therapy, surgery, behavioral, etc. (all qualifiers under Obesity)?

If you do not have answers to these questions, you may just want to review the results of your search(es) to see if you can narrow down your topic. I also tried adding the word PREVENT* in the title which helped narrow the results ("prevent*"[title]) . Success, unfortunately, is subjective and varied and will not yield good results for you. You should be able to quickly assess if the controlled trial has been a success by reading the Results section of the abstract or the concluding sentences of the abstract.  

Here are the results for ("prevent*"[Title]) AND ("obesity/prevention and control"[MeSH]) try using the filters to reduce the results.

Try using the PubMed Medical Subject Headings (MESH) <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/> to look for alternative subjects.

PubMed is an amazing FREE platform and will serve you well throughout your life. 

I did everything that I mentioned above and randomly chose 21 articles. They may or may not be what you are looking for. By reading the title only they appeared to be prospectively testing a specific intervention. <Random selection of 21 articles in PubMed>

I am available if you want to talk through the process.

Thank you

Amy