Are chemotherapy drugs effective in treating colorectal cancer?

Bowel cancer
Name of the Student
Name of the University

PICO question
The PICO question for the research is given
below:
•Are chemotherapy drugs effective in
treating colorectal cancer?
•The key phrases and search terms used for
article extraction were “bowel cancer”,
“colorectal cancer”, “treatment”,
“fluorouracil”, “drug”, and “management”.
These key terms were joined with the use
of three boolean operators namely, OR,
AND, and NOT (McGowan et al. 2016).
P Patients with
colorectal cancer
I Chemotherapy
drugs
C Usual care
O Reduced
symptoms

Selection criteria
•MEDLINE and CINAHL electronic databases were used for extracting articles relevant to the question
being investigated.
Inclusion criteria:
•Articles published in English
•Articles published on or after 2013
•Articles that focused on human subjects
•Research on adult patients
Exclusion criteria:
•Articles published in foreign languages
•Articles published prior to 2013
•Research on animal models
•Articles on children and teenagers

Level of evidences
•All research papers were accessed easily and extracted
following analysis of the titles and abstracts. Most articles
are of high quality evidences and have been appraised
with the use of the CASP toolResearch Number Research Type Source of database
1 Randomised Controlled
Trial
MEDLINE
2 Phase III CRYSTAL study MEDLINE
3 Randomised Controlled
Trial
MEDLINE
4 Randomised Controlled
Trial
CINAHL
5 Randomised Controlled
Trial
CINAHL

CASP tool
•The primary aim of using CASP was to develop a sense of the
research evidences, and applying them in practice.
•The CASP tool was utilised for adopting a structured approach that
would help in assessing the trustworthiness, value and rigour of the
articles (Singh 2013). The checklist was used for determining
whether the evidences presented in the articles can be used in
future practice.
•CASP tool for randomized controlled trial:
https://casp-uk.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/CASP-Randomised-Controlled-Trial-Checklist-2018.pdf

Article 1- Heinemann et al. (2014)
•Randomised controlled trial
•Database- MEDLINE
•Study design- Quantitative
•Research paradigm- Positivism
•No bias reported
•The study concluded that although proportion of colorectal cancer patients achieving
objective responses did not meaningfully vary between FOLFIRI+cetuximab and
FOLFIRI+bevacizumab groups, the connotation with lengthier complete survival
proposed that FOLFIRI+cetuximab was the favoured first-line regimen for all
colorectal cancer patients, having KRAS exon 2 wild type metastatic colorectal type
of cancer.