Topic: Clinical studies

A pill, injection or other treatment that looks like the treatment but does not contain the active ingredient. Placebos can sometimes have a positive effect, known as the placebo effect. This happens when someone who is given a placebo, such as a harmless sugar pill, feels an improvement, like a reduction in symptoms, after taking […]

A method used to prevent bias in research. A computer assigns people into groups by chance, rather than the researchers or doctors choosing the groups.

A study done over a long period of time, often decades, where the participants are usually asked the same questions or have the same tests periodically to assess how their health changes over time.

A stage of a clinical trial. There can be up to four phases (phase 1-4), but not all clinical trials go through every phase. Early phase trials usually look at whether the new intervention is safe, whereas late phase trials test whether the new intervention is better than existing interventions and go on to gather […]

The requirements that must be met for a person to be included in a clinical trial. These requirements help ensure that the treatment is tested in an appropriate patient population and that participants in a trial are like each other in terms of specific factors such as age, type and stage of cancer, general health, […]

In medicine, this means a treatment, procedure, or other action taken to prevent or treat disease, or improve health in other ways. An example of a treatment intervention in cancer is chemotherapy.

Refers to participants who have dropped out of a clinical study.

A factor that is linked to the outcome of a study and unevenly distributed in the study cohorts. For example, if people in the experimental group of a controlled trial are younger than those in the control group, it will be difficult to decide whether a lower risk of death in one group is due […]