The following search may be copied and pasted into a professional database to search for publications on spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy. It must be adapted to the specific database to optimize the retrieval of results. A librarian can help you adapt the search to a specific database, if appropriate.
This search will retrieve records from the free PubMed database but PubMed has complicated search rules. A librarian can help you adapt the search to optimize PubMed's search features.
The search below will not be a comprehensive search which retrieves absolutely every publication about SBMA. This is because searches designed to be comprehensive retrieve all relevant publications also retrieve more irrelevant publications. And searches designed to retrieve only relevant publications usually lose some relevant publications while eliminating the irrelevant publications.
((((bulb* AND (spino* OR spina*)) OR bulbospinal OR spinobulbar OR "bulb*-spinal" OR "spinal-bulb*") AND ("muscular atrophy" OR "muscular-atrophy" OR amyotrophy OR neuropathy OR neuronopathy )) OR ((spinobulbomuscular OR bulbospinomuscular) AND atrophy) OR ("kennedy* disease" OR "kennedy* syndrome")) NOT “foster kennedy”
((((bulb* AND (spino* OR spina*)) OR bulbospinal OR spinobulbar OR "bulb*-spinal" OR "spinal-bulb*") AND ("muscular atrophy" OR "muscular-atrophy" OR amyotrophy OR neuropathy OR neuronopathy )) OR ((spinobulbomuscular OR bulbospinomuscular) AND atrophy) OR ("kennedy disease" OR "kennedy's disease" OR "kennedys disease" OR "kennedy syndrome" OR "kennedy's syndrome" OR "kennedys syndrome")) NOT “foster kennedy”
The suggested search for professional databases may be cut and pasted into PubMed. However, it will still retrieve some irrelevant results. For example, the results will include the spinal muscular atrophies 0-4 of childhood onset. And because there was no name at all for SBMA prior to 1968, then researchers must identify appropriate SBMA symptoms in the older literature rather than search a name of the disease.
PubMed Results include filters on the left side that may be used to further refine the results.
MEDLINE databases use Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) to manage multiple names. However, a specific MeSH for SBMA was created only as recently as 2009. MEDLINE does not routinely go back in time to update and reassign publications to newer MeSH terms. Therefore, researchers searching for older literature can benefit from looking at the MeSH used in the past.
Older MeSH for SBMA represented larger groups of neuromuscular disorders. Therefore, MeSH is not very helpful for historical searches on SBMA. In addition, MeSH were not always assigned consistently. Below, I list a few MeSH that have been used for SBMA.
