Are there clinical trials for stroke? Why are they important?
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Jun 26, 2015
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Dr. John Terry explains the importance of clinical trials.
Are there clinical trials for stroke? Why are they important?
There are clinical trials currently going on for stroke. A clinical trial is a situation where a treatment that is felt to be beneficial but not known for sure to be beneficial, is given to people in a random fashion. So that it's effect can be measured. These trials are extremely important because this is the way that we learn about taking care of stroke patients and how we learn what techniques work and what techniques make people have better outcomes. People often are a little bit nervous when they hear about a clinical trial because they think that the doctors are experimenting on people. However, it takes a lot of work to be done before a clinical trial will be approved. So by the time a clinical trial is going, what you have is a treatment that has fairly good evidence that it helps, very good evidence that it doesn't hurt. And as I said before, what happens typically, is if you enroll in a clinical trial you have roughly a 50% chance of getting the new treatment and a 50% chance of not getting the new treatment. And when the clinical trial is done then the investigators can look how patients did and figure out if the trial treatment helped them. The Clinical Neuroscience Institute actually has a research committee that meets on a weekly basis. And we are currently involved in a number of clinical trials, both local trials as well as trials that are involved nationally and internationally.