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Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Still Searching For a Clinical Trial for Breast Cancer

News programs often report about great medical results that have come from new clinical trials. For patients or their loved ones, these trials can offer hope when existing medical treatments fail.



Your participation can also help advance medical science. What’s the difference between standard treatment and a clinical trial?

According to the National Breast Cancer Foundation:
  • Breast cancer standard treatments are methods that experts agree are appropriate, accepted, and widely used. These standard procedures have proven useful in fighting breast cancer in the past.
  • A breast cancer clinical trial, on the other hand, is an approved research study that some doctors believe has a strong potential to improve standard treatments. When clinical trials demonstrate better results than the standard, that new treatment becomes the standard. Remember, all our current standards were clinical trials at one time.
Clinical trials do pose potential risks, so it’s important to discuss any trial with your physician before signing up.

He or she may have good advice about the pros and cons that will help you make an informed decision. Because there are risks involved, ask what they are in advance.

Also make sure you’ll be informed of any new risks identified during the trial, and find out if the trial results will be made available to you.

Just because you joined a clinical trial doesn’t mean you’re stuck in it until the end. If you want out, you can exit the trial.

Finally, it’s important to remember that clinical trials have become big business, and “Medical ethics experts warn there are still concerns when it comes to protecting participants, with alarming reports in recent years about deaths in clinical trials and persistent questions about conflicts of interest among researchers who have financial stakes in drugs or treatments,” the Wall Street Journal warns. “Patients who are recruited for trials should be told if there are any such conflicts.”

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