Qlt1 Task 1

Instructions
For part one of this week’s assignment, you will revisit the six research articles (3 qualitative and 3 quantitative) that you found in Weeks 6 and 7 that addressed your PCF. Use these articles to practice the initial steps of the Evidence-based Practice (EBP) approach (see Appendix I in Williams, Patterson & Edwards, 2014.). For each article:
Watanbe, Y. & Hongo, S. (2017). Long-term efficacy and safety of lamotrigine for all types of bipolar disorder. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment.
1. ASK: Identify an important clinical question that can be addressed by the study.
2. The clinical question I wanted to find out is whether or not Lamotrigine would be an effective therapeutic agent to treat Bipolar Spectrum Disorders.

On Figure 1 on page 1715, the great flow chart does not show how many of the participants were receiving psych-therapy and how many were not. I also don't see anywhere else in the study that they explain how many participants chose to receive therapy at the same time and what groups they were in. So this some statistics on.

2. In this research, it is similarly difficult to match bipolar participants medical treatment histories. How long had each patient been on each mood stabilizer before the study? Looking back at the previous article about brain structure, I can now see how gathering and reporting information about the participants amount of time on that mood stabilizer is important. This might be a factor that affects the outcome of the study one way or another.

3. In this study, researchers did not use the maximum dose necessary when administering Wellbutrin to patients with Bipolar disorder. There may have been patients that might have a therapeutic response to this medication if they increase the dose up to 450 mg/day. In this study, Paxil was administered at 40 mg/day; however, in the Physicians Desk Reference states that the Paxil maximum dose can be 75 mg/day which may make a difference in how well patients’ response to this antidepressant, especially, if some patients had no response to the medication at 40