Taking the "Random" Out: New Approach to Medical Studies Could Boost Participation

Posted: Published on June 25th, 2014

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Newswise ANN ARBOR, Mich. Its a classic Catch-22: Medical researchers need to figure out if a promising new treatment is truly better than a current one, by randomly assigning half of a group of patients to get each treatment.

But when they approach patients about taking part in the study, those 50-50 random odds dont sound good enough and the study struggles to get enough volunteers. That slows down the effort to improve treatment for that condition.

Now, new research shows the promise of an approach that takes some of the random out of the process, while preserving the ability to compare treatments.

Instead of every patient getting a randomly chosen treatment, the approach adjusts the odds as the study goes along. So if early results show that one of the two treatments appears to work better, each new patients odds of getting that treatment increase. Its called response-adaptive randomization, or RAR.

In a new brief report in the journal Stroke, University of Michigan Medical School researchers report the results of how 418 emergency department patients responded to the two approaches to medical studies.

The researchers asked the patients to imagine they had just suffered a stroke, showed them a video describing a study that needed stroke patients, and asked them whether they would volunteer for that study if they had really just had a stroke.

What the patients didnt know is that half of them had randomly been shown a video that described a classic randomized study, and half had seen the same video but with an added section explaining that if one treatment appeared to be working better in earlier patients, their odds of getting it would improve.

Only 54 percent of the people shown the first video said they would volunteer for the study. But 67 percent of those shown the RAR video said theyd enroll.

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Taking the "Random" Out: New Approach to Medical Studies Could Boost Participation

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