Week 8: Days at the Clinic and Data Extraction

Hello everyone! For this week’s updates, I’ll be focusing on some developments at the clinic and the long-awaited data extraction portion of my meta-analysis. The aforementioned developments at the clinic are much more lighthearted and involve getting closer to the staff rather than any developments in patient care. Dr. Iyer, two other staff members (Mrs. Lay and Mrs. Claudia), a training medical student (Dr. P), and I went out for lunch in celebration of the birthdays of Dr. P and me (which were relatively close together). It was something I was not expecting at all, and it was really sweet! Mrs. Lay has been my main support throughout the clinic, helping me behind the scenes, so this was a great bonding opportunity and made me feel a lot more included in the clinic’s work setting. In the clinic itself, I’ve gotten a lot closer to the phlebotomist and the other side’s nurse, so it’s kind of bittersweet to know I’ll be leaving soon. 

In terms of data extraction, I’ve officially collected all my effect sizes (in the form of hazard ratios/HR) and variances that I’ll need for analysis and plugging into the statistical program R. All my values can be found below (for both directionalities).

The reason I chose to use the hazard ratio instead of alternatives like the risk ratio (RR) or the odds ratio (OR) is that my research questions work well with time-to-event analysis, and since Schizophrenia and postpartum disorders are relatively rare, the OR, RR, and HR are roughly equivalent due to the rare disease assumption, which is commonly used in epidemiological studies and meta-analyses dealing with rare diseases. I am still keeping OR as a backup since some of the studies have nuances that make it so converting to HR is slightly problematic.

Now, what’s left is to perform analysis, which I’ll report back on next week!