Question- Does ginger reduce nausea during pregnancy?

Intervention - Ginger

Comparison - No comparison

Outcome - Reduced nausea

We searched using Boolean operators 'AND', such as, 'Pregnancy AND ginger AND nausea' to expand the search. This enabled us to find papers that used all these terms, giving us a wide variety of results.

Pregnan*

Nause*

Had a wide variety of ginger products used in trial including ginger biscuits, powder capsules, ginger syrup in water, ginger essence capsules, ginger extract capsules and ginger capsules.

Used Cochrane risk of bias tool when analysing RCTs

Papers were critically analysed by two independent researchers

Included what data bases were searched including boolean operators and wildcards.

Used the five point Likert type scale to measure results

Clarified confidence intervals.

Only included English language studies.

Majority of RCTs included in review scored for a high risk of bias on Cochrane Risk of Bias tool.

No blinding used.

Only four RCTs used V6 as a comparison, and other trials didn't have a placebo- hard to generalise papers.

Used a visual analogue scale.

Rhodes score scale used

Focused on research question

Groups were randomly allocated, block random sampling

Study limited to people 6-16 weeks pregnant

Does not have a clear conclusion

Not clear how many women started trial. (77 women finished)

Cannot track women who participated in trial

Uses standard deviation instead of confidence interval.

Does not address adverse affects

Filtered to RCT and Systematic Reviews

48 results in total

19 irrelevant

8 included specific groups e.g. cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, post-op and pre-op patients, as well as many other treatments to ginger which meant the search was too wide.

19 excluded as they were not within the last 10 years

3 were sufficient and narrowed it down 2 because the sample size was greater in the RCT