Lack Of Physician Referals To Cancer Clinical Trials. Therapeutics Initiative | Evidence Based Drug Therapy. New iPhone App Lets Users Record, Share Clinical Trial Data. A new app for the iPhone and iPod touch provides physicians and nurses with mobile access to the reference information contained in the National Cancer Institute’s Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (CTCAE), version 4.0. Developed by the Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMi) at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the app enables users to locate and search through possible adverse events that may occur to patients in a clinical trial, and record any side effects that they encounter. From an alphabetized list of symptoms, users can tap in “ear pain” or “tremor,” and the touch screen will display a definition, and then list grades of the problem—mild, moderate or severe.
Using these categories, a care provider or clinical trial researcher can log data into the trial’s records, so it can be shared with other hospitals and physicians who have patients participating in the same trial. A user can bookmark adverse events and categories that require more frequent access. Pharma Recruits Clinical Trials Subjects Online. Podcast Center. Government Seeks Rx for Deficit of Clinical Trial Volunteers | Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. Miller-McCune. A national program to streamline the recruitment of volunteers for biomedical clinical trials has been launched online by the National Institutes of Health, the primary federal agency charged with supporting and developing medical research in the United States.
People who want to participate in approved clinical trials can log on now to ResearchMatch.org and self-register. Beginning in January, researchers looking for volunteers will be able to review their personal profiles and send them an e-mail message through ResearchMatch — initially, without knowing the volunteer’s name, address or phone number. If, after the initial message, a prospective volunteer wants to release his or her contact information, the researcher might provide more specifics about the study and ask the person to complete a survey at home, go to an outpatient clinic or travel to a research hospital. There is no obligation to participate. The NIH invests more than $28 billion in medical research yearly. Adaptive Evolution - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences. Placebos work, even when patients are in the know, study finds.
A simple sugar pill may help treat a disease — even if patients know they're getting fake medicine. The finding, reported online Wednesday in the journal PloS One, may point the way to wider — and more ethical — applications of the well-known "placebo effect. " "The conventional wisdom is you need to make a patient think they're taking a drug; you have to use deception and lies," said lead author Ted Kaptchuk, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. And, Kaptchuk added, it seems many doctors do this: In one report, as many as half of rheumatologists and internists surveyed said they had intentionally given patients ineffective medication in the hopes it would have a positive result. Kaptchuk, however, wondered whether the deception was needed. Patients were easier to enlist. The researchers enrolled 80 people suffering from irritable bowel syndrome, explaining the experiment while framing it positively — they called it a novel "mind-body" therapy.
Others agreed. Clinical Trials Industry News - Contract Research & Services - Pharmaceutical Business Review. Older adults excluded from clinical trials.