Podcasts

Podcast – Cochrane Dementia Group

Hosted by Dr Anna Volkmer

Reading Time: 25 minutes

This week regular guest host Dr Anna Volkmer talks with the  joint co-ordinating editors of the Cochrane Dementia Group. Listen to hear about the work of Cochrane, how they support evidence-informed decision making in healthcare, their work on undertaking systematic reviews and how you could become involved.

This weeks guests are:

Dr Terry Quinn, Clinical Senior Lecturer, Honorary Consultant and Joint co-ordinating editor of Cochrane Dementia Group. Terry is a clinician working in stroke and older adult services in Glasgow is also the national lead for ageing research in Scotland.

Dr Jenny McCleery, Consultant Psychiatrist & Joint co-ordinating editor of Cochrane who describes herself as first, and foremost a Clinician. In her day-job she works as part of a community team for Older Adults at Oxfordshire Health NHS Foundation Trust.

Cochrane Dementia and Cognitive Improvement Group, is part of Cochrane’s Mental Health and Neuroscience Network. They aim is to provide the highest quality evidence about the care and medical treatment of people with dementia, delirium and other cognitive disorders, and about the diagnosis and prevention of these disorders. This is done through undertaking systematic reviews addressing questions which are important to patients, their families, and healthcare professionals from all disciplines.

You can read more about the scope of Cochrane Dementia and their work here:

https://dementia.cochrane.org/our-work


Click here to read a full transcript of this podcast

Voice Over:

Welcome to the NIHR Dementia Researcher podcast, brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk, in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s Society. Supporting early career dementia researchers across the world.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Hello, my name is Dr. Anna Volkmer, and I’m delighted to be your host for this week’s show. I’m sure you’ve heard from me before, but if you’re new to our podcast, I am a senior researcher and lecturer at University College London, and I also work clinically as a senior speech and language therapist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Central London. And I work particularly with people with dementia-related communication and swallowing difficulties.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Now this week’s podcast topic is the Cochrane Dementia Group. And today we’re going to find out more about who they are and what they do. Now, despite attending a Cochrane systematic review training day a few years ago, and knowing that the work focuses on evidence synthesis, I am never sure I’ve really appreciated how Cochrane actually work, so I’m really looking forward to our discussion.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Joining me today, I have two experts in the area. So first of all, Dr. Terry Quinn, a clinical senior lecturer and honorary consultant from the University of Glasgow and joint coordinating editor of the Cochrane Dementia Group. We also have Dr. Jenny McCleery, consultant psychiatrist and joint coordinating editor of the Cochrane Dementia and Cognitive Improvement Group. Perhaps we could start off with some introductions. So Terry, could you tell the listeners a little bit about your work in dementia and how you got involved with Cochrane?

Dr Terry Quinn:

Yeah, thanks Anna. I am Terry Quinn, I’m a clinician from Glasgow in the UK. So wearing my clinical hat, which I wear for 50% of the week. I work in geriatric medicine, so I look after older people. At the moment most of my clinical work is around stroke, with also quite a lot of vascular dementia. For the other half of my week, I do research that spans dementia, frailty, stroke, and lots of other things, including Cochrane, which we’re going to talk about.

Dr Terry Quinn:

How did I get involved with Cochrane? Well, I was working on a PhD in the field of stroke and I was looking at stroke recovery, and it struck me that we were measuring things like how quickly someone can walk, how well they can use their hand. But the thing that was really impacting the quality of life for stroke survivors was memory and thinking problems. So I then got quite interested in how you went to measure those, and just completely speculatively I emailed Cochrane Dementia and said, “Hello, I’m a researcher, would you like me to work with you?” And the response was, “Yes.” I went down to Oxford for a while and worked there, and I must have done something right, because now with Jenny I’m one of the coordinating editors.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Brilliant. So that’s how the best things happen, just through a pleasant, incidental email. That’s fantastic. And so thank you, Terry. I’m now going to move to Jenny. Now I know, Jenny you’ve picked up knitting as your new year’s resolution, but-

Dr Jenny McCleery:

That’s my lockdown skill of 2021.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Fantastic. But I’d really like to hear a little bit more about your work in dementia and how you got involved with Cochrane.

Dr Jenny McCleery:

Okay. So yes, I’m Jenny McCleery. I am also a clinician, but I’m not a geriatrician, I’m a psychiatrist for older people. I work in Oxfordshire in a community mental health team. I probably spend about 50% of my time working in the memory clinic aspect of the team, and about 50% on general mental health problems. So the Cochrane Dementia Group has been based in Oxford since it started 22, 23 years ago now. And the previous coordinating editor was a colleague of mine, a consultant psychiatrist. So I got involved as an author actually. He was looking for somebody to join a group that was writing a review on cognitive reframing for caregivers of people with dementia, and asked me if I’d be interested. And I got involved working on that review and enjoyed it and gradually just got roped in a bit more to the editing side and then to the coordinating editor role with Terry.

Dr Jenny McCleery:

So yeah, one of those organic sort of things that started, being in the right place at the right time, I suppose, fitting in very much with what I was looking to do. I had a nascent academic career, I have to say, which I had abandoned, and was working only clinically, but at that stage of my career was looking for something else to do alongside the clinical work. And it’s fitted really nicely in there for me.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Interesting how our journeys through clinical academia kind of go up and down. So can you tell me, what is Cochrane?

Dr Terry Quinn:

Okay. So we used to be called the Cochrane Collaboration, and I think that gives you a good clue, we’re an international group, non-commercial, mostly volunteers, and we work to bring together clinical evidence and try and make sense of that. And within the umbrella group of Cochrane are lots of individual review groups, and Jenny and I work for the group that is concerned with dementia research.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Could you tell the listeners a little bit more about what Cochrane Dementia do, other than the traditional meta-analysis, I guess, which is what many of us think of?

Dr Terry Quinn:

Sure. So Cochrane Dementia are just one of the review groups within the broader entity of Cochrane. So we have a remit around trying to bring together evidence and make that evidence useful for clinicians or researchers, for policy makers as well, for people writing guidelines. So we look for published evidence, we pull that together, we critically appraise it, and I think that’s one of the important things that we do. We cast a critical eye over the research and then we try and make some kind of synthesis of all of that and give messages to the people that need that, the on the ground clinicians or people looking to do future research or indeed policymakers.

Dr Terry Quinn:

We also have done quite a lot of work around raising standards in dementia research. There are still some work to be done there, but we have published guidance on how to report certain kinds of research and have also done some work currently to analyze on how to perform certain kinds of meta-analysis. And I’ve probably missed out loads of other important stuff that we do that Jenny can remind me about.

Dr Jenny McCleery:

No, I think that was a good summary, Terry. I mean our scope covers dementia, delirium, and really any chronic cognitive disorders. So we would also produce reviews on the chronic sequela of head injury for example. Although acute head injury sits with a different group, which is the injuries group. And we’re interested in interventions. We’re interested in diagnostic tests, and we’re just beginning to dip our toe into reviews of studies of prognostic factors and prognostic models as well. So yes, it is evidence synthesis, with or without meta-analysis. So there’s quite a lot of reviews that aren’t suitable for meta-analysis, particularly in some of the complex interventions, diverse complex interventions. But yeah, that’s what we do.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Sounds very familiar. I did a systematic review as part of my PhD studies and now I’m an interventionist primarily, and yes, a meta-analysis just was not feasible, especially in speech and language therapy. Now I know when we were preparing for this podcast, you also mentioned Primary Progressive Aphasia, but maybe we’ll come back to that in a moment. And because one of the things that Terry mentioned really resonated around critically analyzing the evidence. And I think that’s particularly tricky sometimes for clinicians to have skills and develop skills and maintain skills in. And so having Cochrane do that is really helpful, but I guess some people might say that all Cochrane Dementia do is criticize other people’s research. So, and why do you not do your own original research? What would you say to that, Jenny?

Dr Jenny McCleery:

Well, I don’t think of us of what we do primarily as criticism. I think we’re communicators actually. So I think what we’re trying to do is communicate research for the reader. So that’s the people that Terry mentioned. Also actually I don’t think he did mention Cochrane reviews are aimed at patients and carers as well. And every review comes with a plain language summary to try and make it accessible to anybody. But I think we also, our communicating research is good for the people who’ve done the research as well. And it can really increase the visibility of your research to have it in a Cochrane review. So I’m an author also on a review of drug treatments for sleep problems and dementia. And there is really surprisingly little research on that, considering what a big clinical problem it is.

Dr Jenny McCleery:

But there’s a team in a university in Brazil who’ve got an interest in that and their study of trazodone for sleep problems and dementia. It’s a small study, but it’s one of the positive studies. And I think including it in the review, which is very highly cited by anyone who’s writing about managing sleep problems in dementia has probably greatly increased the visibility of that study. And I know that they’ve used the recommendations in the dementia, in the Cochrane Dementia review to help them argue for further research funding. So I think we can be a support to researchers, rather than just a critic. But you know, you’re right. I’m completely full of admiration for the people that are there on the front line actually doing the clinical trials, which is clearly a much, much harder job than sitting at a desk and synthesizing the evidence. So yes, I think we do, I hope we do something useful for the readers and the researchers, but I certainly think that the people doing the studies have the harder task.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

I’m really pleased to hear that there’s more accessible versions as well, coming back around to the patients and their families, because I think often it’s hard for people themselves and their families to really know what’s out there, and make decisions about evidence or understand evidence. And I want to ask a slightly unplanned question, are those co-produced, those accessible versions?

Dr Jenny McCleery:

Not as much as they should be. They’re all reviewed by consumers, at least in our group. So we will have a consumer reviewer who looks at those when the peer reviewers are looking at the full review. But we haven’t really got a bank of people at the moment who are interested in actually doing the writing. So we incorporate feedback from consumers, but it would be nice to have some more carers probably in our group who were interested in even more involvement in that.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

And if you ever need any guidance on making them accessible and aphasia friendly, you know where to find me.

Dr Terry Quinn:

We’ve got [inaudible 00:12:56].

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Thank you. And I guess coming back to clients and carers and family members, I think they often will hear about research and think it’s the answer. But I think it is important, similarly with clinicians, isn’t it, to understand the pros and cons of some of the research out there. And so, Terry, some people might again say, “Why are you so negative about some exciting treatments and technologies?” Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Dr Terry Quinn:

So I guess I’m building on what Jenny said. We’re not these bad people in an ivory tower just criticizing all the research that flies past us. I do some primary research as well, and it is tough, so I’m very sympathetic to the problems and I understand why decisions are made around the design and the conduct of the research. But at the end of the day, what we’re doing and what researchers are doing is trying to make things better for people with dementia. And if you just accept things that maybe aren’t giving the right answer, you’re just going to keep repeating the same mistakes and we won’t progress the field. So we do have to be a little bit critical. Here’s when I get controversial-

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Go on.

Dr Terry Quinn:

But let’s just get in early with this.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Go on.

Dr Terry Quinn:

Let’s think about amyloid treatments, you know? So many trials of amyloid treatments know whether they work or not, it’s still up for the beat. But one could argue, has the scientific community learned the lesson from previous amyloid trials? Because it seem to just be repeating the same trails over and over again, and hoping that if we make them bigger or longer we’re going to get a result. Maybe that’s not the way to make a difference.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Could you say the same for some behavioral interventions as well, who are trying to often copy the kind of randomized controlled model proposed by some of the pharmacological interventions? That maybe this kind of analysis, the kind of systematic reviews, can actually help us understand that there might be other ways of evaluating those therapies as well?

Dr Terry Quinn:

Yeah. So, as your intervention becomes more complex, it becomes more and more difficult to do that very traditional placebo versus intervention. Let’s look at outcomes at six months and that will give us an answer. That becomes more and more difficult, but dementia is difficult. Dementia is messy, it’s complex. I think we’ve got to embrace that complexity. We’ve got to look at new ways of performing trials and new ways of synthesizing trials. And I think within group that’s one of the things that we get quite excited about. So we look at new ways of trying to pull together studies and make sense of them.

Dr Terry Quinn:

And if I can give you an example of that from a review that I’m helping with at the moment. One of our more cited reviews in the last couple of years looked at multi-component interventions to try and prevent delirium. And we found that they worked, but it was a bit black box, a multi-component intervention worked. But what was it? What were the magic ingredients? So an update of that review, we’re working with University of Leicester and we’re doing some more complicated stuff where we try and drill down into what are the bits of the intervention that are common across the trials, and what [inaudible 00:16:25] bits actually seem to be driving any difference and which bits aren’t? No spoilers. I will tell you what we found, but we have found some common things where some of these interventions actually seem to be making a difference. And some things that maybe aren’t making such a difference.

Dr Jenny McCleery:

Oh, I hadn’t heard that yet. Hadn’t heard that, hot off the press.

Dr Terry Quinn:

Yeah.

Dr Jenny McCleery:

It’s new, sitting out from that one. If I just go back, so that’s what you said about more behavioral interventions there, because I think there is also a problem actually with those not being replicated, with people not trying to use the same interventions again. Because often what we find in reviews of the behavioral kind of interventions is the trials are small, and everybody who dips a toe into that wants to kind of tweak it and do their own intervention. And because the trials are small, you’ll never really find out what works. So a good example of that is trials for exercise in dementia. So that’s a really kind of hot, popular topic. Everyone wants to know about exercise in dementia, but there are masses of tiny trials that are all doing different interventions in different populations. And there’s really no way of kind of synthesizing those. There’s a place for a lot more kind of dull replication I think of things that look promising.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Yeah, that makes complete sense. Yeah, and the other thing I’ve, this kind of ties in with lots of the work I’ve been doing in speech and language therapy is that often I’ve found that people are already doing, clinically delivering some of it. So sometimes I found the question isn’t necessarily whether it works, but how much works. And as Terry was saying, what is the key bit that you must deliver? And what is the bit that isn’t perhaps so relevant? But I think that’s really, that is such a complicated notion, isn’t it? It’s so complicated. Now I’ve got a few other questions, I’m really enjoying these questions, but when we plan these questions these were questions that we plan to be a little bit contentious. And so I’m quite looking forward to the next one, which is, do people ever approach you and say, “I am working on drug X. Why do you not do a review of this drug X?”

Dr Jenny McCleery:

They do, not always people are working on it themselves, but we get lots of people saying, “Can we do a review on this or that?” And quite often they are rather obscure little drugs. I’d say this happens a lot less than it did in the past. When I started in Cochrane, it was happening all the time. We took a policy decision actually that we were only going to review, particularly this is relevant to drug interventions or some tests, if they were licensed or close to licensing. Because as you know, there have been many, many, many dead-ends in dementia drug research. We could end up with an awful lot of trials that are a bit more rebound really that almost before the trial is finished, people have lost interest and it’s moved on and it’s never going to be updated. So we tend to say a polite no to anything that’s not about to be in clinical use. We’ve got to think that our reviews are going to be clinically useful.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Right, right. And I guess, I think that something that ran through my mind there was that the idea that if I was the person who was doing that, I guess that researcher working with the company to produce this drug and we were about to launch it, and then you did, Cochrane did a review, would it be almost like a seal of approval? I mean, that’s-

Dr Jenny McCleery:

I would probably say more research is needed. [crosstalk 00:21:03] We get criticized for most, is that people say all Cochrane reviews have the same conclusion, which is, yes maybe, but more research is needed. No, I don’t think anybody would see it as a seal of approval at that early stage. I think in other fields, perhaps where there are bigger trials and people have finally got treatments that they can make really definitive conclusions about, then a good Cochrane review that says, “You know, this is now the established treatment,” is really valuable, but dementia research is sadly not really at that stage. We’re still dealing with interventions in particular, but our conclusions are a lot more tentative.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

So it’s not like NICE in a way where I’m just, for sake of comparison, NICE. I remember the NICE dementia guidelines that all said that anyone with mild to moderate dementia should be offered Cognitive Stimulation Therapy. And then all the NHS trusts tried to deliver Cognitive Stimulation Therapy.

Dr Jenny McCleery:

We’re updating our review on cognitive stimulation currently.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Are you? Oh, exciting.

Dr Jenny McCleery:

Yeah, I think a lot of people think that that was not necessarily the best recommendation. Not saying that there’s poor evidence that Cognitive Stimulation Therapy, but there’s not necessarily better evidence than there is for other things.

Dr Terry Quinn:

The motto of Cochrane is trusted evidence, because we work with bodies like NICE, and we work with guideline developers, and it’s why we have to be very careful about how we create that synthesis.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Of course.

Dr Terry Quinn:

If we are saying where there’s high quality evidence that this thing works, that then becomes a recommendation for practice. And the reach of Cochrane evidence is international. So we have to be so careful. And I don’t make any apologies for that. And if that means that there has to be replications of studies to prove an effect, I think that’s okay. Because if we didn’t do that, we’d potentially start investing lots of money in a treatment that doesn’t works well, and it doesn’t at the end of the day improve things for people living with dementia.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Thank you, Terry. I’m going to move back on to our planned questions. Thank you for indulging in my extra questions. And one of the questions we had, and we’ve touched on this really when we’ve been talking a little bit more about amyloid and things like that, there’s hardly any drugs, we know that generally, that there are hardly any drugs that really work in dementia. So why, I guess why bother summarizing those?

Dr Terry Quinn:

Yeah. We often have this existential crisis within Cochran. Why? Why do we do what we do? Well, I mean, the first thing, as Jenny has already said is we don’t only do drugs. And actually a lot of the exciting things that are happening in dementia are nonpharmacological. And for some of them that has reasonably good evidence now. And also we don’t only do trials, again. As Jenny said, we look at things like prognosis, what are the things that may predict your recovery from a cognitive insult? What are the things that might protect your decline from dementia? We’re looking at tests as well. We’re looking to see what is the best way to maybe make a diagnosis of dementia or some type of dementia. So yes, drugs have been disappointing today in dementia, but there’s a lot of other exciting research happening. And I think it’s a privilege that we get to try and pull all of that together to make sense of it.

Dr Jenny McCleery:

And I think I would say, I mean, drug use is not just disease modifying treatments, as people with dementia are prescribed a lot of drugs. They’re prescribed a lot of drugs for, I mentioned sleep problems, but for mood problems, for behavioral problems, for pain. We’ve got some reviews that are about Deprescribing. So when to stop cholinesterase inhibitors and amantadine. We’ve just published that review. We updated last year our review on discontinuing anti-psychotics in dementia. And the review on antidepressants for depression in dementia really shows that they’re not very effective and probably shouldn’t be first-line treatment. Whereas the review on psychological treatments for anxiety and depression and mild dementia had some positive findings. So I think I would say that we do try to take a pretty balanced view of how drugs should and should not be used perhaps in dementia.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

I think you’re really dispelling this myth that I think. I kind of had this mythical belief that Cochrane was more about medics at some point in my career. And you’re really dispelling that. So there are lots of non-medic I guess people involved with Cochrane. You’ve described lots of non-medically focused reviews. Do you want to add to that? Who is in your team? Who are parts of the group you work with?

Dr Jenny McCleery:

Yeah, so our core team, Terry and I are both medics. Our deputy coordinating editor is a professor of nursing. And then we’ve got some information specialists, our managing editor, and our editorial board includes people with particular interests in non-pharmacological interventions. Some of whom are medics, some of whom are not medics. Our author team, our author teams are really diverse backgrounds, actually nurses, psychologists, physiotherapists, speech and language therapists. So really all kinds of allied health professionals.

Dr Jenny McCleery:

Quite some time ago now we had one review that was led by a caregiver. And that was a review of interventions for wandering in dementia. But that’s the only one. I mean, that takes me back a bit to caregiver involvement. You asked about the accessible versions of the reviews. We do try and involve caregivers to a degree in some other roles as well. So for example, we’ve had a couple of reviews where caregivers have been involved in prioritizing outcomes and telling us what are the key outcomes for the review and which outcomes we should include in a summary of findings table.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Can I just ask, who decides priorities on what to look at at Cochrane?

Dr Terry Quinn:

I mean, prioritization is a discussion we’ve been having a lot in the last 18 months, because there are so many things that we could do reviews on. We have to decide which are the ones that we’re going to give support to. We’ve been thinking about different ways of doing that. I think we would like to involve people living with dementia and their caregivers more in that process. And we’re just trying to work out the best way that we may do that. What’s been quite interesting, two students that work with me looked at all of the different national dementia research priority setting exercises that have happened in different countries over the last few years. And they’ve all came up with very different priorities, which I thought was quite interesting.

Dr Jenny McCleery:

I think it’s a really difficult area, because NIHR who funds about half of all the Cochrane Groups and different topics have asked us all to concentrate more on prioritization, but we have very limited resources to do that. And the priorities that we find will depend entirely on who we ask. So it is a difficult area. We have for some years relied to a degree on the James Lind Alliance project that was done in dementia, because obviously they had a relatively large amount of resource that went into that project, which we couldn’t hope to replicate. So, although there are questions that may came up where they’re not review questions, they have given us areas to concentrate on. We would love to know about prioritization exercises that go on elsewhere in the world, because it’s obviously much easier for us being a UK based group to hear about what happens in the UK, but we are, it’s an international collaboration. So if anybody listening has some information about what the national priorities are in their country, then that would be really, really helpful to us.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

We’ll mention how people can get in contact at the end of the podcast, but just in case you stop listening now, if you look under the podcast there’ll be some links for you there. But I’m really pleased to hear that. As Terry was talking about the work your student was doing, I was thinking, I’m guessing that would include the different culture, different cultures, different linguistic backgrounds. There’ll be different issues across the world right now influencing all of these things. And then individually, of course, with our clinical hats on, every person you work with, when you try and provide person-centered care, which we all do, everybody is so different. They’re already, everyone’s already a uniquely different person by the time they get dementia, aren’t they? So.

Dr Jenny McCleery:

I mean, you’re interested in Primary Progressive Aphasia. We are just at the beginning of a process of producing a review about that. But because it’s a relatively rare condition, if we just do a general prioritization exercise, it’s never going to come out at the top. So there’s that to take into account as well. Do you only go for the really big topics, or do you go for important topics and rarer conditions too?

Dr Terry Quinn:

I think that’s so important. There’s almost a sort of equity issue there and our remit isn’t just dementia as it is Alzheimer’s. So we’ve tried to reach out to other research communities that are relevant to us. So we try to do some priority setting in delirium. We tried to do some priority setting in vascular dementia. We tried, not so successfully, but we tried to do some priority setting around care homes-

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Oh gosh.

Dr Terry Quinn:

… and the priorities and people that work in that space.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Which is yeah, huge. I mean, I’m guessing there’ll be lots of new issues as well post COVID. There’s all that to deal with too. Okay. Well, thank you for dealing with my tricky questions. I know you get asked these questions sometimes by people. And I think it’s been really, I’ve actually really enjoyed hearing how you deal with those questions and being able to add in my own questions. And given, I said this when we were planning the podcast, again, I keep coming around to this. Given you’ve got a Primary Progressive Aphasia, potentially a review kind of in the offing, I was saying, “How can I get involved?” And I’m sure many of our listeners will be thinking that. So I wondered if you could share with our listeners, how can they, or how can I get involved with Cochrane if I wanted to?

Dr Jenny McCleery:

So there are, you can get involved at lots of different levels in Cochrane. So there is an organization called Cochrane Crowd, which is actually led by our own information specialist from the dementia group, but it’s a Cochrane wide thing. And that allows people to get involved with small tasks that are helpful to Cochrane, particularly about classifying evidence. So it started with just identifying RCTs, but neither as some slightly more complex tasks being built in for the crowd. So it’s essentially a kind of big citizen science project, doing things that are useful for Cochrane. And that’s a really good way I think to just join the community and people can do it on the go. They can sit on a train and do sort of 15 minutes of whatever the current task is. And people can select topic areas that they’re particularly interested in as well. So that’s one way to do it.

Dr Jenny McCleery:

Beyond that it’s getting involved really with the individual review groups. It is difficult to just kind of turn up and say, “I want to help to write a review.” Because reviews are generally written by kind of big teams who need some expertise already, but there is Cochrane training available. We can sometimes find teams that can slot in someone who’s relatively inexperienced. So a bit of topic knowledge and a bit of training or experience in systematic reviewing or evidence synthesis elsewhere, which might have been doing one for your PhD or something can be a good way into a team. Most countries have Cochrane Centers, countries or regions have Cochrane Centers. So there’s Cochrane Canada, and Cochrane Germany and Cochrane Australia, and the Igbo American Cochran Center. Those are good places to approach, because they may know of local author teams who are looking for help. So it’s yeah, so those are the key ways in.

Dr Jenny McCleery:

If you’ve got a bit of experience, there’s something called Cochrane Task-Exchange. So people who are writing reviews and need a little bit of help with a review, maybe with the screening of the search results or doing some risk buyers assessments will post a task and then people can volunteer to do it. So it’s not the commitment of a full review that might take you a couple of years, sadly, but it’s a more discreet task. So again, when you’re trying to build experience, that can be something to offer as well. Anything I’ve missed, Terry?

Dr Terry Quinn:

I think an important thing to say otherwise, we do try and support people that approach us. Even back many, many years ago when I approached Cochrane, I didn’t really know what Cochrane was, but I just thought, “I’d be interested to help.” So if people are enthusiastic and if they’ve got a bit of time, and if the coin tight Jenny or I, we can often set up a bit of a discussion and see if we can find something that might work for them.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

So just as we come to the finish of our podcast, I wanted to highlight that the importance of Cochrane as a resource is massive. It’s not only for researchers and clinicians. It’s also as Jenny and Terry have really highlighted, it’s for people themselves living with dementia, and their families. And as a clinician and a researcher myself, I found myself using Cochrane on numerous occasions to find research literature. And I’m now really motivated to get involved. And I will be following up on the advice from today’s session, thank you very much. And if anyone else would like to do the same then as Terry highlighted, Terry and Jenny are and will be delighted to hear from you. Now we have profiles of today’s panelists on the website, including details of their Twitter accounts. So if you’d like to ask any follow-up questions, would you both like to share your Twitter accounts now with the listeners? Terry perhaps?

Dr Terry Quinn:

Yeah. So I am @DrTerryQuinn, all one word.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

Fantastic. And Jenny?

Dr Jenny McCleery:

I’m not active on Twitter.

Dr Terry Quinn:

We have a group site, @CochraneDCIG, Dementia and Cognitive Improvement Group.

Dr Anna Volkmer:

We’ll tag those under the podcast and within Twitter as well for you. But just finally to all our listeners, please remember to like, subscribe, and leave a review of this podcast through our website, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Podbean, and SoundCloud, and all the other places that you do find podcasts. Thank you very much.

Dr Terry Quinn:

Thanks, Anna.

Dr Jenny McCleery:

Thank you.

Voice Over:

Brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk, in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK, and Alzheimer’s Society. Supporting early career dementia researchers across the world.

END


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This podcast is brought to you in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s Society, who we thank for their ongoing support.

Have you undertaken a systematic review? Let us know and reply below

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