Medline and Cinahl strategy for chronic kidney disease

I devised this, gathering ideas from a number of sources, including suggestions made when I asked lis-medical, and from more suggestions made when I posted a draft there.



The syntax is for the (English) NHS HDAS interface and will work in both Medline and Cinahl, as the subject headings are the same.  However, it may need amending for Embase.   

1.            ((endstage or “end stage” or established or chronic or progressive) adj1 (renal or kidney) adj1 (failure or disease* or insufficienc*)).ti,ab

2.            (Chronic adj1 nephropath*).ti,ab

3.            (“Chronic uremia” or “chronic uraemia”).ti,ab

4.            (CKD or CKF or CKI or CRD or CRF or CRI).ti,ab

5.            (ESKD or ESRD or ESRF).ti,ab

6.            kidney diseases/ and chronic.ti,ab

7.            exp Renal insufficiency, chronic/ 

8.            Renal insufficiency/ AND chronic.ti,ab

9.            1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8

Why the need for so many search terms?   An article by Hsu and Chertow explores the ambiguity in the use of disease terminology in nephrology, as discussed on this blog post elsewhere.


(The original post stated this needed amending for Cinahl.   I amended the post in March 2018 when I discovered it did not and also removed two stray full stops which caused a problem if copying and pasting the strategy).