What are Clinical Trials?

To ensure participant safety, trials start with small groups and examine whether a new method causes any harm or unsatisfactory side effects.

Clinical trials are research studies that aim to determine whether a medical strategy, treatment, or device is safe for use or consumption by humans. Let’s read more about the process and the how are trials carried out.

Clinical trials may also assess how effective a medical approach is for specific conditions or groups of people. Overall, they add to medical knowledge and provide reliable data to assist in health care decision-making and guidelines. To ensure participant safety, trials start with small groups and examine whether a new method causes any harm or unsatisfactory side effects. This is because a technique that is successful in a laboratory or in animals may not be safe or effective for humans.

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Purpose of clinical trials

The main purpose of clinical trials is research. Trials are designed to add to medical knowledge related to the treatment, diagnosis, and prevention of diseases or conditions.

• Evaluate one or more treatment interventions for a disease, syndrome or condition, such as drugs, medical devices, or approaches to surgery or therapies
• Assess ways to prevent a disease or condition, for example, through medicines, vaccines, and lifestyle changes
• Evaluate one or more diagnosis interventions that might identify or diagnose a particular disease or condition
• Examine identification methods for recognizing a condition or risk factors for that condition

Types of clinical trial

All clinical trials have a primary purpose. These can be broken down into the following categories:
• Treatment: Testing new treatments, new drug combinations, or new approaches to surgery or therapy
• Prevention: Examining ways to improve prevention or recurrence of disease through, for example, medicines, vitamins, vaccines, minerals, and lifestyle changes
• Diagnostic: Finding improved testing techniques and procedures for diagnosing diseases and conditions
• Screening: Testing the best method of identifying certain diseases or health conditions
• Supportive care: Investigating procedures to improve comfort and quality of life for patients with a chronic condition
• Health services research: Evaluating the delivery, process, management, organization, or financing of health care
• Basic science: Examining how an intervention works

Standards and guidelines

Clinical trials on humans occur in the final stages of a long, systematic, and thorough research process. The process often begins in a laboratory, where new concepts are developed and tested. Testing on animals enables scientists to see how the approach affects a living body. Finally, human testing is carried out in small and then larger groups.

Importance of clinical trials

Clinical trials help improve and advance medical care. The studies provide factual evidence that can be used to improve patient care. Clinical research is only conducted if doctors are unaware of elements such as:
• whether a new approach works effectively in humans and is safe
• what treatments or strategies work most successfully for certain illness and groups of individuals

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