Introduction
Clinical trials are research studies in which people help doctors find ways to
improve health and cancer care. Each study tries to answer scientific questions
and to find better ways to prevent, diagnose, or treat cancer. (See
What is a Clinical Trial?)
If you or someone you know has cancer, you might want to learn what the best
research has to say about its prevention, diagnosis, or treatment. But what
constitutes the "best" research? If it's well designed, any clinical
trial can produce reliable findings. But reliable findings aren't always
definitive.
Research findings that are most likely to set the standard of cancer care
usually come from
phase III clinical trials that have been
randomized and
controlled, and that have enrolled enough participants to yield
statistically significant results.
This article explains what these terms mean, and why a phase III randomized,
controlled clinical trial with a specific number of participants is considered
the gold standard in cancer research. With this knowledge, you'll be better
able to tell which cancer studies are the most definitive, and therefore the
most helpful, in guiding your medical decisions.
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