Table 1.

Review question components

Question components	Systematic review
	Inclusion criteria	Exclusion criteria
Population	Any LTC as per DoH definition18	Acute conditions, stress, bereavement etc
Exposure/intervention	Any form of therapeutic writing including emotional disclosure/expressive writing, poetry, diaries, etc	Talking to a listener, counselling, psychotherapy, talking into a tape recorder, mobile phone or similar where this is the primary mode of delivering the intervention, expressive drama, dance, film-making. Evaluation of other people's writing
Comparison	Non-writing, waiting list, inexpressive writing, attention controls and any control thought to be inactive	Any active or possibly active control including therapeutic writing
Outcome	Any relevant clinical outcomes including disease-specific outcomes and generic outcomes such as: quality of life, health service use, psychological outcomes, behavioural outcomes, social functioning, adverse events, adherence to therapies and costs	Intermediate physiological outcomes such as salivary cortisol, immune parameters not routinely measured in the management of LTCs No reporting of numerical results for each group
Study designs	Any comparative studies including RCTs, cohort or case–control studies. Economic evaluations	Single case reports, case series, studies where results for intervention and control groups are not presented separately

DoH, Department of Health; LTC, long-term medical condition; RCTs, randomised controlled trials.