Week 4: A Pivot in Research Design

Hello everyone! For this week’s updates, I’ll mainly be focusing on my independent research outside of my internship, since nothing new has really happened at the clinic this week. I still haven’t gotten deep into LLMs since I’m still looking for resources to guide me; I’ll likely reach out to my father for resources since he has a lot of experience in IT and AI. In terms of my screening process, I am in the process of phase 1.5 of screening/rescreening. The reason I’m doing this second phase is that I ended up with around 20 studies after my last phase of screening, which proves to be a little too small a sample size for my meta-analysis. I’ve chosen to broaden my research question from the association between postpartum (PP) disorders and schizophrenia onset to the association between postpartum disorders and schizophrenia (i.e, both directions). So, if schizophrenia diagnoses lead to a heightened risk of PP disorders, AND vice versa. 

As a result, the research questions informing my meta-analysis are:

• What is the association between postpartum psychiatric illness and the subsequent onset of schizophrenia? Vice versa? 
• What factors moderate the relationship between postpartum illness and schizophrenia onset (e.g., illness type, genetic predisposition, time to onset, parity, or sociodemographic variables)?
• What is the potential impact of publication bias on the estimated association between postpartum psychiatric illness and schizophrenia onset in this sample of studies? 

I have also made some adjustments to the formatting of the sheet I’m using to screen my studies. In my first phase, I am primarily doing title and abstract screening to see if it fits the inclusion criteria of my study (which I’ve discussed in previous posts) or meets any of the exclusion criteria (and thus cannot be included). I’m using a format of 1s and 0s, where 0 = not included and 1 = included in the study. I’ve also color-coded them since my last post, so 0s are red and more noticeable. I am also using the “column stats” feature to keep track of how many studies are included and excluded, which can also be seen in the following snippet! 

Unfortunately, this week was a bit slower than I would’ve liked due to the rescreening, but I hope to bear more news about my journey with LLMs next week.

Till next time, 

Yalini Kathamuthu