Choosing a thesis topic in PG is like marriages in India. For some, just like in arranged marriages, their guide chooses their bride (topic), and others have to find what they love, often ending up dating the first easily approachable girl (topic) they come across, only to regret it later. I recently submitted my PG thesis on Anthropometric Parameters in Diabetic Kidney Disease and have gathered a few tidbits of wisdom along the torturous path that might help you smoothen your three-year journey of post-graduation.
Purpose of Thesis
In medicine, the purpose of a thesis is to make you understand and get accustomed to doing research in the medical field. You might now think of it as completely useless, just like I did, but once you advance in your chosen branch and become senior enough, you’ll be in a position to see things not mentioned in books, tackle clinical scenarios where no guidelines help, and try new methods never tried before. If done and analyzed correctly, these efforts will help in progressing the knowledge of not only you but the whole world. However, let’s get it straight: your thesis is not meant to be a breakthrough research project that shakes the existing medical literature from its roots. It’s just a qualifying criterion you need to get your degree. If something worthwhile comes out of it, that’s great, but the main purpose is to get it done easily and as fast as possible with minimum resistance.
How to Choose a Topic
Here are a few golden rules that my senior told me, and you’ll thank me later for sharing them:
A. Choose Common Diseases
Something commonly available is easier to do as you don’t have to be on the lookout all the time in the hospital to find it. My thesis included two groups of patients, one with diabetes and the other with Diabetic Kidney Disease. I completed the sample size for diabetes in less than a month in a 2-hour daily Medicine OPD because it’s so easily available. The other group, Diabetic Kidney Disease, was not that common in Medicine OPDs but a common disease in Nephrology OPDs, so I had to sit for around 15 days in Nephrology OPD to complete the sample size. Both were common diseases, so I could complete my sample size in a shorter time. If it had been some rare disease like DADA2 (Deficiency of Adenosine Deaminase-2), I would have died in stress from always staying in vigilante mode to find those patients in the hospital. Common diseases make the task easier.
B. Try Not to Do Special Interventions
Observational studies where you just observe the clinical outcomes of patients already on certain treatments or outcomes from routine investigations are always much better than doing interventions. Interventions such as studying the effects of some drug or special investigation not done routinely in your hospital, will take a lot of paperwork and running around to gather data. My study involved checking anthropometry in two groups—one with Diabetic Kidney Disease and the other with diabetes but without Diabetic Kidney Disease. I just had to find the association of parameters like BMI, waist circumference, body fat percentage, etc., between the two groups. For that, I just needed to sit like a tailor with a measuring tape around my neck for around 1.5 months (most painful time). If it had involved some investigation not done routinely, like the role of preemptive fibrinogen testing in dengue patients for HLH prediction, it would have made my life extraordinarily harder.
C. Avoid Follow-Ups
If you could take just one thing from this article, it has to be this: try your best not to do follow-ups in your study; you’ll regret it badly. Follow-ups consume a huge amount of your time and almost doubles or triples your sample size. Suppose your sample size is 50, and you have to follow up once in 3 months, then you have literally extended your data collection time by 3 more months while doubling the sample to 100. If done twice every 2 months, consider the sample size tripled (150) with 4 months extended in data collection. Follow-ups are time consuming, you have to leave everything else productive and go to fill some boring form for the follow-up, which drastically increases your effort needed to complete the same 50 patient data compared to someone who won’t follow up his patients. Cross-sectional studies where you take the data just once or retrospective studies are best because you can track the data from the hospital’s electronic data system. Try to avoid follow-ups and prospective studies unless you can easily access routine tests that patients are supposed to do and retrieve them from electronic records directly in one sitting of multiple patients.
D. Keep as Few Co-Guides as Possible
As the saying goes, “Too many cooks spoil the broth.” This is especially true for thesis work. The more guides you have, the more unnecessary interference you’ll encounter. You’ll have multiple people checking the same stuff with their individual subjective inputs, making you confused about which to follow and which to ignore while wasting your time incessantly. Add guides only if they are extremely necessary, like someone who will help you access patients or in some other meaningful way, or better yet, a sleeping partner in your thesis whose only input will be to sign it at the end without any interference. In most cases, your guide will decide about your co-guides and you won't have much say in it, still, if possible, try to avoid having too many co-guides.
E. Choose What Interests You
Lastly, after all the practical suggestions, I recommend you choose what genuinely interests you, even if it goes against all the above advice, like choosing a rare disease that fascinates you or studying the off-label effect of a new drug on patients requiring close follow-up. If you genuinely enjoy doing it, that will be the best use of your time and of huge benefit to the whole medical fraternity. No one knows, maybe your passion project might become an important research in the future that shakes the medical literature from its roots.
Conclusion
So, all in all, choose a study on a disease that is easier to find, requires no follow-up, and can be done with easily available investigations with as few guides as possible. Most importantly, choose what genuinely interests you. If done correctly, your thesis will not just be an important study but the starting point of many great future scientific endeavors.
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