Cherlyn's Clinical-Trial Blog

Over these past few days in Biology we have been researching about clinical trials, and i researched a clinical trial about Pancreatic cancer. I learned that this study was a double-blind placebo. Double- blind means that when a clinical trial is conducted, the patients and the doctors don't know whether or not they are giving the patient the correct sugar pill. So, they have no clue if the pill will help out the patients with the disease they have or make it worse. Then when the results are in they evaluate the drugs to check if they actually work. In the study that I researched it was about whether or not the drug gemcitabine is more effective by itself or mixed with the drug oxaliplatin in treating this type of cancer. The experimental design was how the patients receive 1 of 3 treatment arms. Then, they compare the survival rates of the parents. There are many different kinds of different placebo double-blind trials, and each one explains how they keep evaluating the drugs to check if it cures the disease over a period of years. I now have a good idea of what double-blind means by researching clinical-trials. The clinical trial that I learned about was really interesting, and the study has been evaluated over the past three years.