Learn About Clinical Trials and Studies

Clinical trials and clinical studies are used for numerous important applications as a way to understand what makes a process work or not. Medical trials are used to determine what makes a human sick or healthy. Paid clinical trials often involve human participants taking new medications as a way of studying their effects. 

Are there clinical trials near me looking for paid participants? What other types of clinical trials exist? NIH clinical trials, FDA clinical trials and TAPUR studies for cancer are all active in 2024. Read on to learn about clinical trials and studies happening today.

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What Is a Clinical Study?
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It is an important process of science to conduct research about various medicines, processes and human conditions. What is a clinical study? Clinical studies, also referred to as clinical trials, use volunteer and/or paid human participants to study and test the results of potential new medicines and treatment options prior to releasing them on the open market. 

Tested items include medical/medicinal, biological, physical or genetic products. New vaccinations or blood-related products are tested. New physical therapy machines or pain medicines are tested. Are clinical studies and trials dangerous?

Clinical trials are potentially dangerous. It is therefore required for all potential new treatments to be tested on laboratory animals prior to being tested on humans. Only treatments exhibiting appropriate safety profile statistics are migrated from laboratory animal-based testing to humans. 

Medical trials focus primarily on the effects of new medicines. NIH clinical trials focus on epidemiology, behavioral health, health services and clinical outcomes/results. FDA clinical trials focus on the safety and efficacy of new products prior to them being introduced to the public market. Targeted Agent and Profiling Utilization Registry (TAPUR) studies are non-randomized clinical trials focused on using FDA-approved anti-cancer medications on participants with types of advanced cancer(s) showing possible actionable genomic alteration.

Randomized clinical trials also exist. What is a randomized clinical trial and how does it differ specifically from non-randomized studies? A randomized clinical trial and a non-randomized clinical trial are each lens through which scientists view the results of a study. 

Non-randomized tests are commonly only conducted in the most ideal conditions. A primary point of a randomized test is to eliminate statistical bias between subjects and control elements to more accurately assess the efficacy of a new treatment option. A randomized control trial (RCT) is also referred to as a blind test. 

For example, ten humans might receive medications but only eight receive the real medicine while the other two receive a placebo. In a blind test, it is not known which human received which medicine until all results are calculated in order to prevent the corruption of the data being tested. 

It is also common for some randomized clinical trials to not use control elements during testing. Non-randomized studies involve every person receiving the same treatment in a non-blinded manner.

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Updated on 05/25/2022