Quality of life, pain and anxiety in patients with nephrostomy tubes.

The study had no control group, so changes over six weeks cannot be separated from other things that happened during that time. Patients were selected non-randomly from one hospital radiology service, and patients from another local hospital were not included, so results may not apply to other settings. The paper used a general quality of life questionnaire and altered the EQ-5D visual scale to a 0 to 10 range. This makes comparison with other studies harder. The study did not analyze whether psychotropic drugs affected anxiety or pain changes. The paper reports 150 patients as the analyzed sample but also says 2 patients were considered lost before the first replacement, so the follow-up numbers are unclear. The pain result is confusing because the paper says the change was significant but also gives a non-significant p value in the same sentence.

Do not read the authors' suggestion of nursing education as a tested intervention. This study measured patients before and after tube placement, so it does not show that education improves quality of life, anxiety or pain.