The articles were classified according to type of article or design as follows: comments or reflections 50, clinical studies 30 (case reports 15, quantitative series 10, and qualitative series 5), guidelines/clinical practice proposals 11, papers designing/describing a PC programme 5, and reviews 5.
A mixed method of quantitative and qualitative (a series of self-complete questionnaire surveys over a period of eleven months and a longitudinal study of interviews and participant observations over a period of four years) was used in the study.
In recent years, the rapid development of sophisticated experiment tools in molecular biology allows the acquisition of high qualitative time series data which can significantly improve the ability of revealing the complex dynamics and interactions of biological systems.
Quantitative: randomised controlled trial, non-randomised controlled trial, controlled before-after studies, observational, cross-sectional Qualitative: case series, ethnography, grounded theory, phenomenology, other, mixed methods Data synthesis: The identified evidence will be collated using a specific analytical framework in order to present a narrative account of the existing literature.
Therefore, we separately report randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and non-randomised designs: comparative observational studies, case series, qualitative studies or qualitative elements of other studies and case studies.
The three basic forecasting methods are qualitative techniques, time series analysis and projection, and causal methods.
Papers were excluded if they were primary prevention studies, phase I and II studies, ecologic studies, systematic reviews, case report/case series, qualitative studies and psychometric studies (development or validation of questionnaires or scales), commentaries, letters to the editors, editorials and conference reports.
We excluded commentaries, narrative reviews, case series, qualitative and anthropological studies, and studies reporting prevalence estimates in children less than 10 years.
Observational, cohort, case control, case series, qualitative studies, uncontrolled trials and laboratory studies were excluded.
Case studies, case series, qualitative studies and uncontrolled trials will be excluded.
We excluded case studies, case series, qualitative studies, uncontrolled studies and controlled trials without randomization methods.
