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By Michelle L.A. Nelson
What proportion of the stroke rehabilitation evidence is relevant to patients with multimorbidity?
Current evidence syntheses serving as the foundation for stroke rehabilitation best practice recommendations do not categorize or report data extraction related to multimorbidity. This may be problematic for the design of stroke clinical practice recommendations. Although it may be expected (based on prevalence data) that multimorbid patients were included in reported rehabilitation intervention studies, by not having an explicit understanding of the patients included or excluded in the evidence, we may be faced with a mismatch between the research participants used to generate evidence, the best practice recommendations, and the patient seen in practice.
We are conducting a systematic scoping review of the stroke rehabilitation intervention literature to identify the evidence relevant to patients with multimorbidity. The study protocol was published in the Journal of Comorbidity [1]. The publication of protocols supports transparency in scoping approaches through the publication of the original proposed study, serving as a baseline from which we can discuss any methodological modifications and subsequently study results. Additionally, a second contribution of publishing this protocol is providing guidance to other researchers in the key elements of scoping protocols and proposals, a clear gap in the literature we discovered during the development of the funding proposal.
The full article can be accessed at: http://www.jcomorbidity.com/index.php/test/article/view/47
1. Nelson, Michelle LA, et al. Stroke rehabilitation and patients with multimorbidity: a scoping review protocol. J Comorbidity 2015:5(1):1-10. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.15256/joc.2015.5.47