Evidence map›Paper›PMID 30610430›Full record

ArticleMedicine, health care, and philosophy2019

Narrative methods for assessing "quality of life" in hand transplantation: five case studies with bioethical commentary.

Emily R Herrington, Lisa S Parker

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Article in Medicine, health care, and philosophy, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
5citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

5 citing papers in PubMed.

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4 · The record

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PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors.

Emily R HerringtonUniversity of Pittsburgh, 4200 Fifth Ave, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260, USA. ecr18@pitt.edu.ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2611-4116
Lisa S ParkerUniversity of Pittsburgh, 4200 Fifth Ave, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260, USA.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Despite having paved the way for face, womb and penis transplants, hand transplantation today remains a small hybrid of reconstructive microsurgery and transplant immunology. An exceptionally limited patient population internationally (N < 200) complicates medical researchers' efforts to parse outcomes "objectively." Presumed functional and psychosocial benefits of gaining a transplant hand must be weighed in both patient decisions and bioethical discussions against the difficulty of adhering to post-transplant medications, the physical demands of hand transplant recovery on the patient, and the serious long-term health risks of immunosuppressant drugs. This paper relates five narratives of hand transplantation drawn from an oral history project to show how narrative methods can and should inform ethical evaluations and the clinical process of hand transplantation. The interviews with patients and their partners analyzed here lead us to suggest that qualitative accounts of patient experiences should be used to complement clinical case studies reported in medical journals and to help develop instruments to assess outcomes more systematically.

Indexed as

Quality of LifeFemaleHand TransplantationHumansInterviews as TopicMaleNarrative MedicineYoung AdultCaregiver burdenDisabilityHand transplantationInformed consentPerson-centered medicineQualitative methodsReconstructive surgeryResearch ethicsVascularized composite allotransplantation

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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.