Nursing Report: Fish Oil Treatment for Osteoarthritis - Case Study

This nursing report presents a case study of Mrs. Peggy, who suffers from knee osteoarthritis, and investigates the potential of fish oil as a treatment option. It formulates a PICO question to compare the effectiveness of fish oil in older women with osteoarthritis. The report details the database search strategy, utilizing MEDLINE and CINAHL, to retrieve relevant articles published between 2013 and 2017. The search terms included keywords related to osteoarthritis, fish oil, and knee pain. The findings reveal that while research on fish oil's efficacy in humans is limited, the database search yielded a randomized control trial and a systematic review supporting its effectiveness in alleviating osteoarthritis pain. The report concludes by acknowledging the need for further research before recommending fish oil as a sole treatment option for Mrs. Peggy, despite the positive findings from the literature review. The report also includes references to support the claims.

Running Head: NURSING
Nursing
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1NURSING
Introduction
The paper deals with the case study of Mrs Peggy who is suffering from osteoarthritis in
knees. In response to her condition, a PICO question is designed. To address the question
database search is performed and the relevant articles are retrieved. The paper summarises the
relevance of the article search.
PICO question
In older women with osteoarthritis is fish oil an effective treatment option?
P- population- older women
I-Intervention- fish oil
C-Comparison- Who do not take fish oil
O-Outcome- effective treatment option
The above given PICO question is designed with the aim of comparing the effectiveness
of using fish oil in treating the osteoarthritis knee condition in older adults. The purpose of the
PICO is to facilitate search for addressing the developed PICO question that is directly relevant
to the concerned patient. It is an evidenced based practice of finding the best clinical literature
(O'Sullivan et al., 2013). If the literature review gives an evidence of efficacy of the intervention
in concern, then the patient can be recommended to take the fish oil as a mean of relieving
osteoarthritis knee pain.
The two databases that have been used for literature review and extraction of the relevant
article are MEDLINE and CINAHL.

2NURSING
MEDLINE is the US based database that is recognised as “premier bibliographic”
database. The database stands for “MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System”. This
premiere database contains more than 24 million references to academic journals, newspaper,
magazines on the subject of medicine and life science. It is the primary content of PubMed. The
database provides consumer oriented health information as an NLM service. The health care
professionals prefer this database for its broad coverage (Rowe et al., 2017).
CINAHL stands for “Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature”. It
provides 2.3 million records that may be as old as of year 1981. The database provides more
than 3,000 journals and publications in English-language. The database covers information on
17 allied health disciplines, covers biomedicine, nursing, contemporary medicine and many
others. It not only allows to access the journal articles but also gives access to health care
books, selected conference proceedings, nursing dissertations, audiovisuals and educational
softwares (Wright et al. 2015). Both the databases offer comprehensive search mode with
automatic term mapping facility. However, for this purpose, CINAHL is selected due to personal
convenience.
Search terms
Key words
terms/phrases
Alternative words
P Osteoarthritis women,
arthritis elderly women,
knee osteoarthritis women,
knee pain
I Fish oil, fish oil pain relief,

3NURSING
Fish oil osteoarthritis,
fish oil remedy,
knee pain fish oil
fish oil osteoarthritis,
C fish oil,
omega 3 fish oil,
fish oil efficacy,
Dietary fish oil
fish oil, marine oil,
Dietary fatty acids,
O Fish oil knee treatment,
Fish oil pain relief,
knee treatment fish oil
fish oil relief osteoarthritis,
Efficacy fish oil,

4NURSING
For CINAHL
Action Search mode Results Limiters/
Expanders
S1 SmartText searching-
Effectiveness of fish oil
in osteoarthritis
206 Expander: Apply related
words
S2 SmartText searching-
Fish oil in arthritis pain
treatment
155 Expander: Apply related
words
S3 Find all my search
terms- Fish oil OR
Osteoarthritis women
137 Limiter- Publication
type- The journal of
clinical nutrition, Full
text, Peer reviewed
article,
2013-2017
S4 Find any of my search
term - fish oil IN
57 Limiter- Peer reviewed
article, Publication type-
The journal of clinical

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arthritis pain#
WILDCARD searching
nutrition, Full text,
2013-2017
S5 Boolean/Phrase- fish oil
AND Osteoarthritis
patients*
(Truncation)
29 Limiters- Publication
type- The journal of
nutrition, health &
aging, Full text, 2013-
2017, Peer reviewed
S6 Boolean Phrase-
osteoarthritis treatment
AND Fish oil#
7
Limiters- Peer reviewed
article, 2013-2017, Full
text,
(Source: Richardson-Tench et al., 2016)
Relevant results
As per the literature review, the recent research in the period 2013-2017 related to fish oil
as remedy for osteoarthritis in older patient is limited. It is evident from the literature that fish
oil being the best source of omega-3-fatty acids does benefit to the body (Pittaway et al., 2015).
However, there is limited studies of efficacy of fish oil on human. Mostly, its efficacy was
studied in animal model. The two relevant results that are extracted after the article search from
the CINAHL are one randomised control trial (Hill et al., 2016) and one systematic review by
Senftleber et al., (2016). Both the papers showed effectiveness of fish oil to alleviate
osteoarthritis pain in older patients. Thus, the database search was relevant in addressing the
PICO question. It can be considered effective to take fish oil along with other treatment process
or medication. Presently it can be considered sole effective treatment option for osteoarthritis.

6NURSING
Conclusion
As per my research, only one quantitative paper gave strong evidence of the efficacy of
fish oil. Further, the research gave only moderate evidence from a qualitative paper regarding the
effectiveness of the fish oil for treatment of osteoarthritis. Thus, there is a need of further
research before it can be advocated to Peggy.