Assignment: Evidence-Based Project, Part 2: Advanced Levels of Clinical Inquiry and Systematic Reviews

Assignment: Evidence-Based Project, Part 2: Advanced Levels of Clinical Inquiry and Systematic Reviews

This presentation will discuss my selected clinical issue of interest and describe how I developed a PICOT question focused on the clinical issue of interest. I will include the four research databases used to conduct the search for the peer-reviewed articles and the citations for the articles.  Besides, I will describe the level of evidence of each peer-reviewed article. Lastly, I will discuss the strengths of using systematic reviews for clinical research.

The clinical issue of interest is cognitive decline in mild-moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD). AD is a neurocognitive disorder characterized by progressive deterioration of cognitive function (Berg-Weger & Stewart, 2017). The decline in cognitive function results in cognitive deficits, evidenced by short-term memory, language dysfunction, poor judgment, impaired reasoning, difficulty managing complex tasks, and visuospatial dysfunction (Berg-Weger & Stewart, 2017). Pharmacological therapies available for AD helps only to slow or reverse the progression of AD but do not reverse the effects of cognitive decline. Besides, therapies previously proposed for AD have produced mostly disappointing outcomes (Berg-Weger & Stewart, 2017).  Therefore, there is a major need to identify non-pharmacological approaches to improve cognitive function in the early stages of the disease before the symptoms progress.

I developed a PICOT question centered on cognitive function in AD by first identifying a population of interest. In this case, the population of interest was patients with mild to moderate AD.

The second step was to identify an intervention that would help address the issue of cognitive decline in AD. The identified intervention was cognitive training combined with drug therapy. The intervention will be compared to drug therapy alone. The next step entailed identifying a measurable outcome that will be used to determine the effectiveness of the proposed intervention. The desired outcome after cognitive training is improved cognitive function. Lastly, I set up a time frame that will be used to evaluate the intervention. The time frame for this case is six months.

Assignment Evidence Based Project Part 2 Advanced Levels of Clinical Inquiry and Systematic Reviews

The PICOT question for the clinical issue is:

In patients with mild to moderate AD (P), does cognitive training combined with drug therapy (I) compared to drug therapy alone (C) improve cognitive function (O) in six months (T)?

The PICOT question for the clinical issue is:

In patients with mild to moderate AD (P), does cognitive training combined with drug therapy (I) compared to drug therapy alone (C) improve cognitive function (O) in six months (T)?