Guest Author - Krissi Danielsson

After I had my second miscarriage, I became a research junkie. I wanted to read every single thing I could get my hands on to understand what had happened to me. I felt like my doctors were giving me the runaround and I had a strong pull to become informed. That was part of the inspiration behind my Recurrent Miscarriages Info Center site (shameless self promo).

I haven't updated that site in a while, since I've been focusing more of my spare time on this one, but for those of you who are like me and want to research everything, I wanted to spend some time talking about Google Scholar. Google Scholar has got to be one of the hands down, most empowering tools for anyone who wants to be informed and involved with any aspect of one's health care. I am using Google Scholar extensively as a part of the research for my upcoming book, and I have been absolutely blown away by the information I have found there.

To start, Google Scholar is a special project by Google that allows you to search trade journals. It has an impressive number of medical journals indexed, and with most of them, the link brings you to the abstract at a minimum and the entire article when you're lucky. Even starting from the main page, just type in "miscarriage" to start getting tons of information. If you have some particular areas of interest, such as progesterone and miscarriages, for example, just alter your search terms. Be sure to vary the reference to miscarriage to include "spontaneous abortion" or "pregnancy outcome" or other clinical language in order to maximize the range of your results.

It's helpful to have taken a course in research techniques before embarking on this type of learning mission. For example, you may find studies that were done with very small sample sizes or not well screened samples. Usually, studies done with a larger sample are more definitive. Studies that used control groups and compared potential treatments to a placebo are also more useful than those that screened patients poorly and did not compare the treatment to a control group. (Here's a general guide to evaluating health information from the Internet.)

In general, the information you find on sites like Google Scholar will be far better starting points for initiating discussions with your doctor about miscarriage causes than will your average everyday websites (such as the past articles I've done here about miscarriage causes, which have only been brief surveys of consumer info). But beware that often "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." Some early findings may later be shown to be invalid by subsequent studies. Or some studies find factors linked to miscarriages that are correlations rather than causations. In addition, if you've had one miscarriage rather than recurrent miscarriages, researching miscarriage causes may cause you to worry unnecessarily.

Because statistics continue to show that readers of this site are interested in miscarriage causes, I will be starting a series in the near future that profiles some of the journal articles off Google Scholar that are most commonly cited in other publications, particularly regarding issues such as progesterone supplementation, incidence of chromosomal abnormalities as a miscarriage cause, immunotherapy, and other controversial issues. In the meantime, I just wanted to put a highlight on this terrific resource for anyone out there who has not yet stumbled across it on your own.

If you have not yet taken my survey about pregnancy loss, in which I am looking for comments to include in my upcoming book, and you have some thoughts you would like to share, please visit here. Thank you very much in advance. I have programmed the survey to send you back to this website upon completion.