Q; Are vitamin supplements required after gastroplasty?

In this case I have no knowledge of a specialist resource (e.g. guideline) that might be helpful, so I need to start with a search:

Step 1: I go to the TRIP Database and carry out the search gastroplasty vitamin. To automatically carry this search out follow this URL (click here, but try and open the link into a new window - see below for details).  Just by scanning the links you can see which may be relevant, I review all of these. I found some material (NICE and American Family Physician articles) but I was hoping for more! 

Step 2: Visit PubMed.  Repeating the search above (gastroplasty vitamin) returns 69 results, which sounds good.  But one note of caution is that PubMed does not look at bariatric surgery.  Gastroplasty is one version of bariatric surgery (there are others), so you may want to include the broader bariatric surgery which sometime can be useful.  There are definate 'cons' associated with this approach (you get more results, many will not be pertinent to the question).  However, there are advantages.  For instance it might pick up a review of bariatric surgery that may have been missed by focussing on simply gastroplasty.

So I need to search for that as well!  This means I need to carry out a structured search:

• Search for gastroplasty
• Search for bariatric surgery
• Search for vitamins

Now, click on the history tab of PubMed and you'll see this:

 Now you need to combine the search, so in the search box I type:

(#2 OR #3) AND #4 (in reality that equates to (gastroplasty OR bariatric surgery) AND vitamins

That now returns 125 results (17 reviews).  That might seem a lot, but to place that into context I could use the limits tab to restrict to those articles with an abstract published in the last five years and that reduces to just 63 (14 reviews).  So now it's a question of reviewing these results.  It may be crude but with that number (I feel that's a fairly managable number, expecially I simply 'eyeball' the titles to see which are pertinent. After looking at around 30% I select two which I feel help with the question.

Step 3: Extract the relevant information and write up (click here for our answer). 

How to open a link in a new window.  Instead of clicking the left mouse button on the link, press the right mouse button.  Depending on your browser this will bring up a drop down menu which will allow you to 'Open in a new window' or 'Open in a new tab', select which one suits you!