Building a Foundation for the Undergraduate Research Symposium

In continuing my research for the Metropolitan State University of Denver Undergraduate Research Symposium, this portion has been by far the most tedious. I spent the past three months compiling patient medical records, recording patient Medication Profiles,  preliminary reports and sifting through results. This unseen foundation of research will be the platform on which I build my presentation.  

Data, Data, Data

To provide background on the volume of data; there are 288 patients enrolled in the registry. Each patient has between 1-5 Medication Profiles on record. These records include initial and updated prescriptions, over-the-counter pharmaceuticals and dietary supplements. All told, there is a minimum of 288 medication profiles and a maximum of 1,440, which means there is an average of 720 medication profiles entered into the database.

Filtering the Report

After recording the items listed on each Medication Profile, I ran a preliminary report to assess the content. Data fields used included: Patient registry number, ICD-9 code, medication name, dose amount, unit, route and frequency. Table 1 depicts the data filtering process.

Answering Primary Research Questions

This set of filtered data is the basis for my research. I quantified both numeric values and text frequency to answer my primary research questions.

Answering Secondary and Tertiary Research Questions

To answer my secondary research question “Is there a correlation between dietary supplement intake and annual infection rate?” I ran a report using data from patients’ Clinical Progress Report. From these monthly telephonic check-ups, data fields used included: Patient registry number, date of report, and y/n presence of infection.

I averaged monthly infection counts to determine an annual rate and transposed that number over the yes/no status of dietary supplement use for each patient to determine if annual rates of infection were lower for patients who complemented their IG therapy with dietary supplements. But to get those results – you’ll have to stop by my poster at the research symposium!

To answer my tertiary research question “What does the research say?” I pooled clinical articles from PubMed using search terms “IG therapy, CVID, nutrition, dietary supplements, deficiency,” and “complementary medicine.” I have yet to conclude on significant research trends.

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Check back in the spring for updates on writing the abstract, creating the poster and completing the registration process!

For more information check out the IDEaL Patient Registry .