How often are researchers forced to abandon expensive clinical trials in cancer research?
More often than you might think. A study presented earlier this month at the Genitourinary Cancers Symposium found that one-fifth of studies of cancer clinical trials from 2005-2011 were ended prematurely for reasons that had nothing to do with the effectiveness of the treatments or the health of the subjects.
That's an astonishing figure. Imagine if General Motors abandoned one-fifth of its cars before completing them, and instead tossed them on some scrap heap. Or imagine if hospitals dismissed one-fifth of their patients before completing their treatment. The cancer problem is even worse, because it affects not only the subjects thrown out, but untold numbers of others who might have benefitted from what would have been learned with completion of the trial.
"This problem has huge implications," said one of the study's authors, Kristian Stensland of the Mount Sinai school of medicine in New York. "Not only does it waste financial resources and human capital in the form of patients, clinicians, and investigators, it also diverts patients from trials addressing other clinical questions or the same question at a different site."
I got that quote from a solid story by Charles Bankhead at MedPage Today, whose San Francisco dateline suggests he attended the symposium. The main reason studies were abandoned was the researchers' inability to enlist enough subjects, this in a disease expected to strike almost 1.7 million people in the U.S. in 2014. And studies can't find enough subjects?
Bankhead also reports that Stensland determined that two factors double the odds that a study would not be completed: sponsorship by industry, and participation by only a single research center.
I found a story at cancernetwork.com and the abstract at urotoday.com, but nothing in the mainstream media. MedPage Today is a trade publication, too, but it is broader than either of the other two, and its stories are understandable to non-specialists, especially if you're willing to tolerate parenthetical confidence intervals and a few other technical details.
This is an important story–one that might have made page one in a lot of places with proper backgrounding and broader reporting. (Hint: It still could.)
-Paul Raeburn
[Note: My wife, Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, contributes to MedPage Today.]
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