This is the next installment of our look at the increasingly high placebo response that is plaguing clinical trials in analgesia and psychiatry. Check out the other posts here. Over the past few weeks, we’ve discussed the psychological, neurobiological, and genetic mechanisms responsible for the placebo response. Today, we turn to the study designs used...
A trial’s success depends largely on the ability to recruit and retain an adequate number of participants. Recruitment can be especially difficult in opioid clinical trials, due to a variety of factors. Here are seven things you should know about the challenges associated with recruiting patients for opioid trials: 1. Certain necessary aspects of trial...
Opioid analgesics are essential to the management of pain in many patients, but they are also associated with potential risks for abuse, overdose, and diversion, concerns which must be considered in the planning and execution of clinical trials studying these controlled substances. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of conducting clinical trials of controlled...
When you’re looking into conducting a natural history study, you’ve got two things to consider up front: the premise that underlies all of these studies, and which of several types suits your purpose. We tackled these and other topics in our last rare disease webinar. Natural History vs. Registry Studies in Rare Disease considers a...
In 1978 the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research issued the Belmont Report, which has since become a pivotal document in medical research ethics. This report pointed to three unifying ethical principles that must be followed in clinical research: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice, which are considered fundamental for...
Adaptive design is a type of clinical trial methodology that incorporates prospectively planned opportunities for modification of one or more aspects of a study’s design or its hypotheses based on interim analysis of study data. Explicitly planning these pre-specified changes helps to maintain scientific integrity while also introducing greater flexibility in the clinical research environment. The major...
When it comes to pediatric analgesic clinical trials, protocols cannot be simply “cut and paste” from adult trials. Likewise, extrapolation of efficacy and risks from adult studies is not always reliable due to developmental and physiological differences. Researchers engaged in pediatric trial design must consider the specific physiology, pharmacology, and normal daily activities for each group being...
Vaccines were once thought to have great potential for combating some types of cancer, but reality has failed to match those expectations. To date, vaccines have failed to play a major role in the pursuit of immune response for oncology patients. There have been two notable successes — sipuleucel-T (marketed as Provenge) is approved to...
Wearable medical devices are yielding increasingly important insights into health. Rosalind Picard, Sc.D., professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, discussed the applications of one such device, wearable wrist sensors that measure electrical changes in the skin, in an informative plenary lecture we attended at the American Pain Society’s 36th annual meeting in Pittsburgh,...
Short-duration acute pain management trials involve a variety of complex factors that must be taken into account for successfully evaluating the safety and efficacy of a new analgesic product. These five considerations are key. 1. Choosing the Right Model There are a number of established pain models for clinical research, each with its own type, intensity,...