BackgroundHealth-evidence.ca is an online registry of systematic reviews evaluating the effectiveness of public health interventions. Extensive searching of bibliographic databases is required to keep the registry up to date. However, search filters have been developed to assist in searching the extensive amount of published literature indexed. Search filters can be designed to find literature related to a certain subject (i.e. content-specific filter) or particular study designs (i.e. methodological filter). The objective of this paper is to describe the development and validation of the health-evidence.ca Systematic Review search filter and to compare its performance to other available systematic review filters.MethodsThis analysis of search filters was conducted in MEDLINE, EMBASE, and CINAHL. The performance of thirty-one search filters in total was assessed. A validation data set of 219 articles indexed between January 2004 and December 2005 was used to evaluate performance on sensitivity, specificity, precision and the number needed to read for each filter.ResultsNineteen of 31 search filters were effective in retrieving a high level of relevant articles (sensitivity scores greater than 85%). The majority achieved a high degree of sensitivity at the expense of precision and yielded large result sets. The main advantage of the health-evidence.ca Systematic Review search filter in comparison to the other filters was that it maintained the same level of sensitivity while reducing the number of articles that needed to be screened.ConclusionsThe health-evidence.ca Systematic Review search filter is a useful tool for identifying published systematic reviews, with further screening to identify those evaluating the effectiveness of public health interventions. The filter that narrows the focus saves considerable time and resources during updates of this online resource, without sacrificing sensitivity.

Background:Sleep disturbance and fatigue are common and distressing pediatric cancer-related outcomes. Sleep hygiene education and relaxation techniques are recommended to improve sleep in healthy children and adult cancer survivors. No studies have tested these interventions to improve sleep and fatigue for children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in the home setting.Objectives:The aim of this study is to establish the feasibility and acceptability of a sleep hygiene and relaxation intervention to improve sleep and fatigue for children receiving maintenance chemotherapy for ALL. The child's fatigue and sleep data were collected to inform sample size calculations for a future trial.Methods:In this pilot randomized controlled trial, 20 children were allocated randomly to the sleep intervention or control group. The sleep intervention group received a 60-minute educational session to discuss sleep and fatigue in children with cancer and strategies to improve sleep, including use of 2 storybooks to teach deep breathing and progressive muscle relaxation. Objective sleep data were collected using actigraphy and fatigue was measured using the Childhood Cancer Fatigue Scale.Results:The intervention was acceptable to families, and feasibility of the intervention and data collection was clearly established. Although not statistically significant, increases in mean nighttime sleep and decreases in mean wake time after sleep onset in the sleep intervention group represented clinically important improvements.Conclusions:This pilot study demonstrated the feasibility and acceptability of a sleep hygiene and relaxation intervention for children undergoing maintenance chemotherapy for ALL.Implications for practice:Given the clinically important improvements in sleep observed, replication in a larger, adequately powered randomized controlled trial is merited.