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This information about clinical trials is provided for your convenience. NAAPNET cannot advise you whether participating in clinical trials in general or in a specific clinical trial is right for you. Discuss this with your physicians.
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Understanding what clinical trials are
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Clinical trials are studies in people of new treatments, procedures, or devices to find out if they will be as useful as or more useful than existing ways to treat a particular condition. Clinical trials usually involve new, unproven treatments being compared to the current standard approach. There are several types -- or phases -- of clinical trials.
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Basically,
Phase 1 studies are looking for the right dose to give people without causing them undue harm;
Phase 2 studies verify the dose and look at a small group of people to see if there are any signs that the test material is effective;
Phase 3 studies compare the effectiveness of the test material (in one group) with the effectiveness of a standard treatment (in a similar group)---or, rarely and usually only if there is no standard treatment, the comparison is with a similar group of people getting no treatment;
Phase 4 studies are carried out after a test drug is approved for marketing to learn more about it.
[See the link in the next paragraph for more thorough descriptions. Highly Recommended]
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The U.S. federal government provides some excellent explanatory material that you can read to help you to decide whether you are interested in clinical trials. At the following url -- http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ -- see the link under Resource Information called “Understanding Clinical Trials”.
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Finding out about specific clinical trials
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Search terms: To search for clinical trials dealing with carcinoid or other Neuroendocrine cancers, try using one or more of the following search terms: carcinoid, carcinoid cancer, Neuroendocrine, carcinoid syndrome, carcinoid tumor, antiangiogenesis, islet cell, MEN1. Liver cancer studies sometimes include patients with NET tumors that have metastasized to the liver, so try searching under liver cancer too. Keep trying to find just the right search words.
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It also can be confusing to try to recognize the names of the test medications mentioned in clinical trials because sometimes the generic name is used and sometimes the brand name is used.
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Websites:: The following websites have some useful information about specific clinical trials as well as clinical trials in general:
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A.
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http://www.clinicaltrials.gov
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This federal government site tries to list all clinical trials funded by the government and as many other trials as possible.
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B.
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http://cancernet.nci.nih.gov
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For cancer trials and other information, or more specifically for trials: http://cancertrials.nci.nih.gov/ (NCI = the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health [NIH].)
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C.
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http://clinicalstudies.info.nih.gov/
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If you want to find relevant local studies taking place only at NIH
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D.
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Various
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Some of the nongovernmental health/medicine sites on the internet also do lists of clinical trials. But you must keep in mind that some of them - - for example, the misleadingly named www.clinicaltrials.com -- exist solely to attract you to specific trials for which they are being paid to recruit you.
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Some others probably do provide a service of listing many trials sponsored by many different sources, but you certainly have the right to wonder (and perhaps you will want to ask them) why their sources are not all willing to be listed for free on the main government site, www.clinicaltrials.gov
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This page was last updated March 1, 2005.
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