Article
In this 7th issue, you will find a new contribution dealing with the text of the Results section.
The principal goal of the Results section is to present your main results clearly, logically, and accurately. You must also explain where and in what form the data are presented (see next issue: Presenting the results (2): Tables and figures). The results must be given without any comments: the results, nothing but the results! Any personal comments should be kept for the Discussion section. The Results section is relatively easy to write. Short sentences, which are easier to understand, should be preferred to long ones.
Dans ce 7ème numéro, vous trouverez une nouvelle contribution portant sur le texte de la partie Résultats.
L’objectif premier de la partie Résultats est de présenter les principaux résultats de façon claire, logique et précise. Vous devez également expliquer où et sous quelle forme se trouvent les données (voir numéro suivant, Présenter les résultats (2) : Tableaux et figures). Les résultats doivent être présentés sans aucun commentaire : les résultats, rien que les résultats ! Tous les commentaires personnels devraient figurer dans la partie Discussion. La partie Résultats est relativement facile à rédiger. Il faut privilégier les phrases courtes, qui sont plus faciles à comprendre.
Here is an example of a typical Results section:
Voici un exemple type de la partie Résultats:
Results
From January 2005 to December 2011, 157 patients underwent surgery for gastric cancer. Curative resection was performed in 109 patients and palliative resection in 48 patients. At the time of the study, 68 patients were alive and met the inclusion criteria. Fifty-four of these patients (79%), 36 men and 18 women, answered the questionnaire. Their mean age was 67 (range 41-89) years and 39% of the patients were aged 70 years or older. Mean follow-up was 49 (range 15-111) months.
Twenty-four patients underwent total gastrectomy and 30 had subtotal gastrectomy. Duration of follow-up in patients who had total gastrectomy was shorter than that in patients who had subtotal gastrectomy, 41 versus 59 months. Women were three times as likely as men to undergo total gastrectomy (15 versus 5). Perigastric lymphadenectomy (D1) was performed in 28 patients and D2 lymphadenectomy in 26 patients. Nine patients experienced major intra-abdominal complications after surgery; seven of these had an intra-abdominal abscess owing to leakage from the duodenal stump after subtotal gastrectomy. No patient subsequently received adjuvant chemoradiotherapy.
Classification of patients according to tumour stage was as follows: 33 were stage I, eight were stage II, 12 were stage III and one patient was stage IV. There was no correlation between tumour stage and quality of life.
Variables
Patients over 70 years of age had higher scores and more symptoms in each of the dimensions of quality of life. The difference in scores only reached statistical significance in the social dimension and did not have an impact on the overall quality of life.
Women had higher scores in all dimensions of quality of life, but no significant differences were seen in any dimension, or in overall quality of life.
Patients who underwent total gastrectomy had higher scores in all dimensions of quality of life, but the differences were statistically significant only in the physical dimension (p = 0.034). There were no differences in overall quality of life. In the physical domain, a higher proportion of patients had diarrhoea (17 of 24 versus 18 of 30) and changes in eating habits after total gastrectomy (14 of 24 versus 10 of 30), but these differences did not reach statistical significance. Ninety per cent of the patients lost weight after surgery, but no differences were seen between the two groups at the time of the study.
Patients had higher scores after D2 lymphadenectomy than after perigastric lymphadenectomy, but the differences did not reach statistical significance. No clinical differences were found between these two groups.
Finally, there was no relationship between the history of any major postoperative complication and the subsequent quality of life after gastrectomy. The characteristics of the patients are shown in Table 1.