Participate in a Clinical Trial
Clinical trials are research investigations in which human volunteers are used to help evaluate new drugs, medical devices, or other applications in strictly scientifically controlled settings. In the United Stated, clinical trials are required before a drug can receive approval from the Food and Drug Adiminstration (FDA) and made accessible to consumers. Trials may be designed to assess the safety and efficacy of an experimental therapy, to assess whether a new treatment is better than the standard approach, or to compare the efficacy of two therapies.Patients play an invaluable role in the process. The very nature of clinical trials dictates that these kinds of investigations would not be possible without volunteers.
Why Participate In a Clinical Trial?
There are a number of benefits for people who choose to take part in research studies:
- The opportunity to play an active role in your healthcare.
Being personally involved in your treatment is empowering.
- Participants have access to medications and/or treatments
that are not otherwise available outside of the study and may not be FDA
approved for several years.
- Study participants receive their study medications and/or
treatments free
of charge and may be
reimbursed for travel expenses or paid for their time.
- Clinical trials often take place at the leading healthcare
facilities in the country, and the investigators are very experienced and
renowned medical specialists.
- Participants are not only helping themselves, but they are
also helping others by contributing to medical research and, hopefully, making
it possible for the studied treatment or medication to become FDA approved.
- Participants have the freedom to leave a research study at
any time, for any reason.
If you are interested in learning more about participating in a clinical trial, first consider asking your movement disorder neurologist if he/she is aware of any studies that are recruiting volunteers. Additionally, below are two websites that allow you to search for clinical trials by key words and specific disorders:
Center Watch Clinical Trials
www.centerwatch.com
This site contains information related to clinical trials, such as a listing of more than 41,000 industry and government sponsored clinical trials as well as new drug therapies recently approved by the FDA. This site is designed for both for patients interested in participating in clinical trials and for research professionals:
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Trials
www.clinicaltrials.gov
The United States National Institutes of Health, through its National Library of Medicine, has developed ClinicalTrials.gov to provide patients, family members and members of the public current information about clinical research studies, including contact information for those studies sponsored by the NIH.
The DMRF presents information on current studies in order to further scientific understanding of dystonia, but the DMRF does not endorse nor recommend participation in these or any other medical research studies. All persons should seek the advice and counsel of their physician before participating in any medical research study.
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