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Meditation for adults with haematological malignancies

Overview of attention for article published in Cochrane database of systematic reviews, February 2016
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  • Good Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (72nd percentile)

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Title
Meditation for adults with haematological malignancies
Published in
Cochrane database of systematic reviews, February 2016
DOI 10.1002/14651858.cd011157.pub2
Pubmed ID
Authors

Ines Salhofer, Andrea Will, Ina Monsef, Nicole Skoetz

Abstract

Malignant neoplasms of the lymphoid or myeloid cell lines including lymphoma, leukaemia and myeloma are referred to as haematological malignancies. Complementary and alternative treatment options such as meditation practice or yoga are becoming popular by treating all aspects of the disease including physical and psychological symptoms. However, there is still unclear evidence about meditation's effectiveness, and how its practice affects the lives of haematologically-diseased patients. This review aims to assess the benefits and harms of meditation practice as an additional treatment to standard care for adults with haematological malignancies. We searched the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL, Issue 8, 2015), MEDLINE (1950 to August 2015), databases of ongoing trials, the metaRegister of Controlled Trials (mRCT) (http://www.controlled-trials.com/mrct/), conference proceedings of annual meetings of: the American Society of Hematology; American Society of Clinical Oncology; European Hematology Association; European Congress for Integrative Medicine; and Global Advances in Health and Medicine (2010 to 2015). We included randomised controlled trials (RCTs) using meditation practice for adult patients with haematological malignancies. Two review authors independently extracted data from eligible studies and assessed the risk of bias according to predefined criteria. We evaluated quality of life and depression. The other outcomes of overall survival, anxiety, fatigue, quality of sleep and adverse events could not be evaluated, because they were not assessed in the included trial. We included only one small trial published as an abstract article. The included study investigated the effects of meditation practice on patients newly hospitalised with acute leukaemia. Ninety-one participants enrolled in the study, but only 42 participants remained in the trial throughout the six-month follow-up period and were eligible for analysis. There was no information provided about the average age and sex of the study population. We found a high risk for attrition bias and unclear risk for reporting bias, performance and detection bias because of missing data due to abstract publication only, thus we judged the overall risk of bias as high. According to the GRADE criteria, we judged the overall quality of the body of evidence for all predefined outcomes as 'very low', due to the extent of missing data on the study population, and the small sample size.As the abstract publication did not provide numbers and results except P values, we are not able to give more details.Meditation practice might be beneficial for the quality of life of haematologically-diseased patients, with higher scores for participants in the mediation arms compared to the participants in the usual care control group (low quality of evidence). Levels of depression decreased for those practising meditation in both the spiritually-framed meditation group and the secularly-focused meditation group in comparison to the usual care control group, whose levels of depression remained constant (low quality of evidence). The influence of meditation practice on overall survival, fatigue, anxiety, quality of sleep and adverse events remained unclear, as these outcomes were not evaluated in the included trial. To estimate the effects of meditation practice for patients suffering from haematological malignancies, more high quality randomised controlled trials are needed. At present there is not enough information available on the effects of meditation in haematologically-diseased patients to draw any conclusion.

X Demographics

X Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 7 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 291 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
South Africa 1 <1%
Unknown 290 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Master 43 15%
Student > Bachelor 37 13%
Student > Ph. D. Student 22 8%
Researcher 19 7%
Student > Doctoral Student 18 6%
Other 44 15%
Unknown 108 37%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Medicine and Dentistry 58 20%
Nursing and Health Professions 38 13%
Psychology 34 12%
Social Sciences 12 4%
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology 8 3%
Other 33 11%
Unknown 108 37%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 5. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 08 February 2017.
All research outputs
#7,333,503
of 25,457,858 outputs
Outputs from Cochrane database of systematic reviews
#8,401
of 11,842 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#110,670
of 406,387 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Cochrane database of systematic reviews
#186
of 239 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,457,858 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 71st percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 11,842 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 38.9. This one is in the 26th percentile – i.e., 26% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 406,387 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 72% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 239 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 21st percentile – i.e., 21% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.