Writing assignment #2: What studies have been done?
In the previous assignment, you were given an article that described various studies that were done to try to understand individual differences in temperature regulation. You saw that articles like this in the popular press may be fun to read, but they don't contain enough detail to allow us to decide whether the conclusions are reasonable. To get this kind of detail it would be necessary to find the articles that originally described the research.
The purpose of this assignment is to give you experience in finding research reports on a topic that is likely to be in the news in the next few years: the possible use of "nutritional supplements" such as chondroitin sulfate or glucosamine to treat osteoarthritis. These compounds are available at local health food stores or through the internet:
But is there any evidence that they work? To answer this, you would want to find the articles that describe research in this field, and see what kind of experiments they have done. For this assignment, you should use one of these online bibliographical resources:
Find abstracts from five original research articles that are relevant to this question. These should be the original research report, not review articles. They may be studies where the effects of glucosamine or chondroitin sulfate were studied in people, animals, or in vitro. Note that the most recent articles that come up in your search may not have abstracts available yet, so you may have to go to less recent articles.
For each article, you should submit
When listing the references on which your paper is based, use the format
Author(s). (Publication year). Article title. Journal title Volume:
Page numbers
Stern, K., McClintock, MK. (1998) Regulation of ovulation by
human pheromones. Nature 392: 177-179.
Do not quote the article itself. You should "translate" the technical language of the article into your own words, so that I know that you know what you're talking about. For example, "After consensual diagnosis by at least three MH-CRC psychiatrists, all subjects were found to have no lifetime history of a mental disorder by DSM-III-R criteria" might be translated as "All the people were mentally healthy."
Example:
Google, A.R. and Yahoo, G. B. (1999) Chondoitin sulfate in veterinary practice: My dog ate my homework. Journal of Canine Mishaps 27: 341-349.
The authors' dog, which had been limping around with arthritis, inadvertently ingested some chondroitin sulfate one day, and the next day was seen chasing the neighborhood cat. This article simply reports an anecdotal observation on one dog whose behavior was observed for one day, and it is quite possible that the dog's behavior that day was due to something else that happened to occur that same day, such as the cat being suddenly frisky, and was not actually due to chondroitin.