Consequences of extended bed rest - finding the articles to read

[anna_reads_science]

Quite a long time back now, I added 'consequences of extended bed rest' to my topics of interest list. At the time, I did a very superficial review of the literature, and found a lot of studies on healthy young men, which I didn't think were going to be much use to my set of chronically ill friends who were interested in the potential risks to them of spending much of their lives in bed (or equivalent).

Today, I've done a wander through google scholar, and eventually lucked in to the search term "restricted physical activity"; bed rest which has netted me 579 references when I allow citations, and 562 when I don't (I wish there were a way to say 'show me the ones I've lost' but I have no idea how; I've stuck with no citations for now). I'll note that this is a much better number than my original search ('extended bed rest'), which yielded 1.2 million responses.

Obviously I'm not going to read all of those - for those moment, I'm whittling it down to papers in English that I can get the full text of, that talk about bed rest in settings other than prolonged hospital care/ICU settings. I didn't actually look at all 562 references -- at about the 350 mark, there stopped being any relevant papers on a page, so I stopped looking after multiple such pages.

I'm omitting papers for the following reasons:

• focus on pregnancy
• title includes one or more of 'weightlessness', 'space/spaceflight', 'microgravity'
• paper is about 'head down' bed rest -- these are the ones I was finding previously, and my memory of the protocol is that it isn't a 'normal' way to rest in bed -- or mucks with the diurnal cycle
• research cohort is 'healthy male participants', children, or non-human animals
• focus is mortality, brain injury, or a condition that isn't applicable to the question of chronic fatigue or similar conditions
• bed rest as a treatment (for any acute condition, eg. sciatica, myocardial infarct, fractures of any type)
• focus on exercise for treating the effects of prolonged bed rest, because my bet is that they are going to be looking at completely unachievable levels of exercise
• reference is a PhD thesis or book chapter - the former should turn up as papers; the latter fails the 'easily downloadable' criterion
• where it appears that the only reason the search has found it is a citation to one of the relevant papers

I'm leaving in most others where I'm a bit ho-hum about whether they are going to be relevant. This includes some that are about rehabilitation or 'mobility protocol' where the reference is to people who are decidedly unwell; those talking about 'strict bed rest'; or where the title made no sense but didn't meet any of the omit criteria. I suspect these are going to fail out in the reading process, but just in case...

This has netted me a total of 51 papers to think about. The next phase is to link these all in to my zotero library, and then start the 'yes, no, maybe' sort to see which ones I'm going to read. At least four of the papers I downloaded are on interesting subjects I'd like to follow up on, but the papers won't turn up in this topic!