Talk:Hypoalbuminemia

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 29 October 2019 and 6 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Naharris2. Peer reviewers: Surajkapoor94.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 00:10, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

WikiProject Med Work Plan

Weekly Work Plan

1. Mon 11/4 WP-WIP #1: I will have written a new introductory paragraph as well as provided a comprehensive definition of hypoalbuminemia that incorporates the information currently on this page.
2. Fri 11/8 WP-WIP #2: I will have added sections on the biology of hypoalbuminemia that includes the common causes and consequences of it.
3. Fri 11/15 WP-WIP #3: I will have added sections on the clinical relevance of hypoalbuminemia including screening tools and treatments.
4. Fri 11/22 WP-WIP #4: I will finish the article and incorporate peer feedback into it.

Why this one? Include WP rating scale? How fit with your interests? Hypoalbuminemia is a commonly found incidental finding in a broad array of diagnostic workups and is rarely followed up with appropriate counseling. Due to the commonality of this finding alongside its lower clinical utility, it is graded as of medium importance on Wikipedia. Therefore, having readily available information for patients is imperative to allay concerns and ensure appropriate long-term follow-up. As a pediatrician, this finding is common but uncommonly discussed with patients. This makes it interesting to me specifically.

Initial Analysis of the article: Currently, this Wikipedia article gives a broad overview of the existence of hypoalbuminemia as well as a few of the most common causes but does not provide much with respect to focused clinical information as well as patient (or provider) education. The minimal discussion likely contributed to its rating as a stub article by Wikipedia editors.

Overall organization, what changes: Currently, the page lacks an organizational theme and is instead a list of facts. I aim to break this down into sections on biological and clinical relevance including sub-sections as described above.

What will you augment? What will you add? I aim to increase the utility of this page by expounding upon the information already provided by diving deeper into the medical literature on the already-discussed topics (liver, kidney, edema, anion gap, etc.), in addition to expanding the scope to include underlying biology, common causes, consequences, means of monitoring, and treatments that are relevant to patients with hypoalbuminemia, specifically. I will also structure it in a way to be consistent with the Wikipedia guidelines for medical articles.

What will you remove? What will you decrease coverage of? All of this information is relevant but unorganized. I aim to incorporate all of it in my final edits.

I am interested in hearing other input on what could be added to this page to make it more useful to readers.

--Naharris2 (talk) 16:26, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

--In the efforts of making this page more expansive, I have changed directions and am now planning on adding as much information I can to each of the sections (which were chosen based on the style manual for WikiMedicine), and then alter grammar and flow to make it sound better and be more accessible to general readers. If you have any information you would like to add at this point, feel free. Or, if you would like to work on flow, this would also be appreciated. Thanks! --Naharris2 (talk) 20:48, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

WikiMed 2019 Vanderbilt Peer Review

Dr. Harris, Excellent work on your Wikipedia edits. I know you are still continuining to edit and improve the article but below is my peer review and comments.

Lead Section

First sentence: I really like how simple the first sentence is and how you have wikipedia links to all the major topics in the sentence.

I like how you have examples of conditions that lead to hypoalbuminemia in the lead. I think the rest of the lead summarizes the rest of the major contents of the article well. One suggestion would be that several of the sentences at the end of the lead are long and complex with multiple parts and I feel they could be made easier to read. Additonally, I feel like it would be easy to add some wikipedia links to the latter half of the lead.

Article

Organization: Well organized. Logical flow to sections. All sections are broken up well into paragraphs when applicable. I really like the subheadings under causes. It may be worth looking into using internal links in the article to direct to them (this was something talked about in reference to my article in our last WIP meeting). Additionally, you could change the name of the treatment section to management, which is recommended by the wikimedia medical article style guide.

Content: All sections have truly excellent content that gives the reader considerable knowledge about the topic. All sections appear to be well cited as well. Writing uses lots of transition words making it easier to read. There appears to be a typo in the pathophysiology section which reads "For example, calcium binds to albumin; i hypoalbuminemia." I am not sure exactly what the sentence is trying to say. I like the albumin structure image and the pitting edema image and think they definitely contribute well to the article. I think it may be beneficial to add some wikipedia links to the treatment section (for example for plasmapheresis). Additionally, it may be worth looking into adding subheadings to the treatment section for the different types of them if you think there is enough information and enough categories of them.

Balance: All sections and headings appear to have appropriate length and representation in the article.

Tone: Balanced tone, accessible to medical professionals and patients alike. Sticks to neutral tone and consistent language throughout article.

References

Citations: Citations are excellent throughout article. Looks like you removed and added a significant number of citations from the previous version.

Sources: Appear to be majority review articles and looks like these review articles are cited multiple times throughout the sections which is excellent.

Surajkapoor94 (talk) 20:38, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

Thank you so much for these comments and suggestions! They were extremely helpful, especially given that this page went from nothing to a lot in such a small amount of time. I especially appreciate your comments about the flow and content. As the sole writer for a lot of these sections, it is helpful to hear positive feedback about these sorts of changes. For your recommendations for improvement, I will respond to them point by point below.

Simplifying Lead: I agree that my sentence structure can get a little academic and not very accessible. Therefore, I separated out all of my compound sentences into more simple sentences. I think that this has increased readability. This is still rated as Grade 15 on Hemingway, so there is still work to do, though. I appreciate you pointing this out.

Internal Links: I tried to do this but struggled. Is the easiest way to do this to make it an external link or am I missing something? I will ask you about this in person to better the page! I love this idea.

Minor changes: You made a number of minor suggestions that I made and think have had a really positive effect on the overall quality of the page. These include changing the title of treatment to management, fixing the typo in the pathophysiology section, and adding Wikipedia links to many of the sections that lacked them. Thank you for identifying these issues!

Changes I did not make: One change you recommended was to break up the treatment section into separate parts. As you suggested, I think that there isn't enough information at this time to separate them. What I envision happening in the future is that this section gets filled in as more data and information is collected about each of the indications. Or you could imagine the subheadings being "Indications", "No indications", and "Controversy" or something along those lines. I don't think I have enough information as of now to make this change, but will continue to think about this as the page expands and more sources are added.

Again, thank you for doing this peer review. The article is definitely better now than when your review was written and I think it will help me maintain a framework for bettering the page, specifically with respect to minimizing the convoluting nature of some of my sentences and organizing each section into sub-sections as appropriate. Thanks so much!

Naharris2 (talk) 13:37, 18 November 2019 (UTC)