Small Clinical Trials

Small Clinical Trials PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309171148
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Book Description
Clinical trials are used to elucidate the most appropriate preventive, diagnostic, or treatment options for individuals with a given medical condition. Perhaps the most essential feature of a clinical trial is that it aims to use results based on a limited sample of research participants to see if the intervention is safe and effective or if it is comparable to a comparison treatment. Sample size is a crucial component of any clinical trial. A trial with a small number of research participants is more prone to variability and carries a considerable risk of failing to demonstrate the effectiveness of a given intervention when one really is present. This may occur in phase I (safety and pharmacologic profiles), II (pilot efficacy evaluation), and III (extensive assessment of safety and efficacy) trials. Although phase I and II studies may have smaller sample sizes, they usually have adequate statistical power, which is the committee's definition of a "large" trial. Sometimes a trial with eight participants may have adequate statistical power, statistical power being the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis when the hypothesis is false. Small Clinical Trials assesses the current methodologies and the appropriate situations for the conduct of clinical trials with small sample sizes. This report assesses the published literature on various strategies such as (1) meta-analysis to combine disparate information from several studies including Bayesian techniques as in the confidence profile method and (2) other alternatives such as assessing therapeutic results in a single treated population (e.g., astronauts) by sequentially measuring whether the intervention is falling above or below a preestablished probability outcome range and meeting predesigned specifications as opposed to incremental improvement.

Designing Clinical Research

Designing Clinical Research PDF Author: Stephen B. Hulley
Publisher: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins
ISBN: 1451165854
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
Designing Clinical Research sets the standard for providing a practical guide to planning, tabulating, formulating, and implementing clinical research, with an easy-to-read, uncomplicated presentation. This edition incorporates current research methodology—including molecular and genetic clinical research—and offers an updated syllabus for conducting a clinical research workshop. Emphasis is on common sense as the main ingredient of good science. The book explains how to choose well-focused research questions and details the steps through all the elements of study design, data collection, quality assurance, and basic grant-writing. All chapters have been thoroughly revised, updated, and made more user-friendly.

Group Sequential and Confirmatory Adaptive Designs in Clinical Trials

Group Sequential and Confirmatory Adaptive Designs in Clinical Trials PDF Author: Gernot Wassmer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319325620
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
This book provides an up-to-date review of the general principles of and techniques for confirmatory adaptive designs. Confirmatory adaptive designs are a generalization of group sequential designs. With these designs, interim analyses are performed in order to stop the trial prematurely under control of the Type I error rate. In adaptive designs, it is also permissible to perform a data-driven change of relevant aspects of the study design at interim stages. This includes, for example, a sample-size reassessment, a treatment-arm selection or a selection of a pre-specified sub-population. Essentially, this adaptive methodology was introduced in the 1990s. Since then, it has become popular and the object of intense discussion and still represents a rapidly growing field of statistical research. This book describes adaptive design methodology at an elementary level, while also considering designing and planning issues as well as methods for analyzing an adaptively planned trial. This includes estimation methods and methods for the determination of an overall p-value. Part I of the book provides the group sequential methods that are necessary for understanding and applying the adaptive design methodology supplied in Parts II and III of the book. The book contains many examples that illustrate use of the methods for practical application. The book is primarily written for applied statisticians from academia and industry who are interested in confirmatory adaptive designs. It is assumed that readers are familiar with the basic principles of descriptive statistics, parameter estimation and statistical testing. This book will also be suitable for an advanced statistical course for applied statisticians or clinicians with a sound statistical background.

Clinical Trials

Clinical Trials PDF Author: Tom Brody
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0123919134
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 673

Book Description
Clinical Trials: Study Design, Endpoints and Biomarkers, Drug Safety, and FDA and ICH Guidelines is a practical guidebook for those engaged in clinical trial design. This book details the organizations and content of clinical trials, including trial design, safety, endpoints, subgroups, HRQoL, consent forms and package inserts. It provides extensive information on both US and international regulatory guidelines and features concrete examples of study design from the medical literature. This book is intended to orient those new to clinical trial design and provide them with a better understanding of how to conduct clinical trials. It will also act as a guide for the more experienced by detailing endpoint selection and illustrating how to avoid unnecessary pitfalls. This book is a straightforward and valuable reference for all those involved in clinical trial design. Provides extensive coverage of the "study schema" and related features of study design Offers a "hands-on" reference that contains an overview of the process, but more importantly details a step-by-step account of clinical trial design Features examples from the medical literature to highlight how investigators choose the most suitable endpoint(s) for clinical trial and includes graphs from real clinical trials to help explain each concept in study design Integrates clinical trial design, pharmacology, biochemistry, cell biology and legal aspects to provide readers with a comprehensive look at all aspects of clinical trials Includes chapters on core material and important ancillary topics, such as package inserts, consent forms, and safety reporting forms used in the United States, England and Europe For complimentary access to our sample chapter (chapter 24), please copy and paste this link into your browser: http://tinyurl.com/awwutvn

Clinical Trials

Clinical Trials PDF Author: Tom Brody
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0128042583
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 897

Book Description
Clinical Trials, Second Edition, offers those engaged in clinical trial design a valuable and practical guide. This book takes an integrated approach to incorporate biomedical science, laboratory data of human study, endpoint specification, legal and regulatory aspects and much more with the fundamentals of clinical trial design. It provides an overview of the design options along with the specific details of trial design and offers guidance on how to make appropriate choices. Full of numerous examples and now containing actual decisions from FDA reviewers to better inform trial design, the 2nd edition of Clinical Trials is a must-have resource for early and mid-career researchers and clinicians who design and conduct clinical trials. Contains new and fully revised material on key topics such as biostatistics, biomarkers, orphan drugs, biosimilars, drug regulations in Europe, drug safety, regulatory approval and more Extensively covers the "study schema" and related features of study design Incorporates laboratory data from studies on human patients to provide a concrete tool for understanding the concepts in the design and conduct of clinical trials Includes decisions made by FDA reviewers when granting approval of a drug as real world learning examples for readers

Randomised Response-Adaptive Designs in Clinical Trials

Randomised Response-Adaptive Designs in Clinical Trials PDF Author: Anthony C Atkinson
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1584886935
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Book Description
Randomised Response-Adaptive Designs in Clinical Trials presents methods for the randomised allocation of treatments to patients in sequential clinical trials. Emphasizing the practical application of clinical trial designs, the book is designed for medical and applied statisticians, clinicians, and statisticians in training. After introducing clinical trials in drug development, the authors assess a simple adaptive design for binary responses without covariates. They discuss randomisation and covariate balance in normally distributed responses and cover many important response-adaptive designs for binary responses. The book then develops response-adaptive designs for continuous and longitudinal responses, optimum designs with covariates, and response-adaptive designs with covariates. It also covers response-adaptive designs that are derived by optimising an objective function subject to constraints on the variance of estimated parametric functions. The concluding chapter explores future directions in the development of adaptive designs.

The Prevention and Treatment of Missing Data in Clinical Trials

The Prevention and Treatment of Missing Data in Clinical Trials PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 030918651X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 163

Book Description
Randomized clinical trials are the primary tool for evaluating new medical interventions. Randomization provides for a fair comparison between treatment and control groups, balancing out, on average, distributions of known and unknown factors among the participants. Unfortunately, these studies often lack a substantial percentage of data. This missing data reduces the benefit provided by the randomization and introduces potential biases in the comparison of the treatment groups. Missing data can arise for a variety of reasons, including the inability or unwillingness of participants to meet appointments for evaluation. And in some studies, some or all of data collection ceases when participants discontinue study treatment. Existing guidelines for the design and conduct of clinical trials, and the analysis of the resulting data, provide only limited advice on how to handle missing data. Thus, approaches to the analysis of data with an appreciable amount of missing values tend to be ad hoc and variable. The Prevention and Treatment of Missing Data in Clinical Trials concludes that a more principled approach to design and analysis in the presence of missing data is both needed and possible. Such an approach needs to focus on two critical elements: (1) careful design and conduct to limit the amount and impact of missing data and (2) analysis that makes full use of information on all randomized participants and is based on careful attention to the assumptions about the nature of the missing data underlying estimates of treatment effects. In addition to the highest priority recommendations, the book offers more detailed recommendations on the conduct of clinical trials and techniques for analysis of trial data.

Clinical Trial Design

Clinical Trial Design PDF Author: Guosheng Yin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118183320
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
A balanced treatment of the theories, methodologies, and design issues involved in clinical trials using statistical methods There has been enormous interest and development in Bayesian adaptive designs, especially for early phases of clinical trials. However, for phase III trials, frequentist methods still play a dominant role through controlling type I and type II errors in the hypothesis testing framework. From practical perspectives, Clinical Trial Design: Bayesian and Frequentist Adaptive Methods provides comprehensive coverage of both Bayesian and frequentist approaches to all phases of clinical trial design. Before underpinning various adaptive methods, the book establishes an overview of the fundamentals of clinical trials as well as a comparison of Bayesian and frequentist statistics. Recognizing that clinical trial design is one of the most important and useful skills in the pharmaceutical industry, this book provides detailed discussions on a variety of statistical designs, their properties, and operating characteristics for phase I, II, and III clinical trials as well as an introduction to phase IV trials. Many practical issues and challenges arising in clinical trials are addressed. Additional topics of coverage include: Risk and benefit analysis for toxicity and efficacy trade-offs Bayesian predictive probability trial monitoring Bayesian adaptive randomization Late onset toxicity and response Dose finding in drug combination trials Targeted therapy designs The author utilizes cutting-edge clinical trial designs and statistical methods that have been employed at the world's leading medical centers as well as in the pharmaceutical industry. The software used throughout the book is freely available on the book's related website, equipping readers with the necessary tools for designing clinical trials. Clinical Trial Design is an excellent book for courses on the topic at the graduate level. The book also serves as a valuable reference for statisticians and biostatisticians in the pharmaceutical industry as well as for researchers and practitioners who design, conduct, and monitor clinical trials in their everyday work.

Classical and Adaptive Clinical Trial Designs Using ExpDesign Studio

Classical and Adaptive Clinical Trial Designs Using ExpDesign Studio PDF Author: Mark Chang
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470438568
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
ExpDesign Studio facilitates more efficient clinical trial design This book introduces pharmaceutical statisticians, scientists, researchers, and others to ExpDesign Studio software for classical and adaptive designs of clinical trials. It includes the Professional Version 5.0 of ExpDesign Studio software that frees pharmaceutical professionals to focus on drug development and related challenges while the software handles the essential calculations and computations. After a hands-on introduction to the software and an overview of clinical trial designs encompassing numerous variations, Classical and Adaptive Clinical Trial Designs Using ExpDesign Studio: Covers both classical and adaptive clinical trial designs, monitoring, and analyses Explains various classical and adaptive designs including groupsequential, sample-size reestimation, dropping-loser, biomarker-adaptive, and response-adaptive randomization designs Includes instructions for over 100 design methods that have been implemented in ExpDesign Studio and step-by-step demos as well as real-world examples Emphasizes applications, yet covers key mathematical formulations Introduces readers to additional toolkits in ExpDesign Studio that help in designing, monitoring, and analyzing trials, such as the adaptive monitor, graphical calculator, the probability calculator, the confidence interval calculator, and more Presents comprehensive technique notes for sample-size calculation methods, grouped by the number of arms, the trial endpoint, and the analysis basis Written with practitioners in mind, this is an ideal self-study guide for not only statisticians, but also scientists, researchers, and professionals in the pharmaceutical industry, contract research organizations (CROs), and regulatory bodies. It's also a go-to reference for biostatisticians, pharmacokinetic specialists, and principal investigators involved in clinical trials. ERRATUM Classical and Adaptive Clinical Trial Designs Using ExpDesign Studio By Mark Chang The license for the ExpDesign Studio software on the CD included with this book is good for one-year after installation of the software. Prior to the expiration of this period, the software will generate a reminder about renewal for the license. The user should contact CTriSoft International (the owners of ExpDesign Studio) at www.CTriSoft.net or by email at [email protected], about renewal for the license. This should have been made clear in the first printing of this book. We apologize for this error.

Sequential Experimentation in Clinical Trials

Sequential Experimentation in Clinical Trials PDF Author: Jay Bartroff
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461461146
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
Sequential Experimentation in Clinical Trials: Design and Analysis is developed from decades of work in research groups, statistical pedagogy, and workshop participation. Different parts of the book can be used for short courses on clinical trials, translational medical research, and sequential experimentation. The authors have successfully used the book to teach innovative clinical trial designs and statistical methods for Statistics Ph.D. students at Stanford University. There are additional online supplements for the book that include chapter-specific exercises and information. Sequential Experimentation in Clinical Trials: Design and Analysis covers the much broader subject of sequential experimentation that includes group sequential and adaptive designs of Phase II and III clinical trials, which have attracted much attention in the past three decades. In particular, the broad scope of design and analysis problems in sequential experimentation clearly requires a wide range of statistical methods and models from nonlinear regression analysis, experimental design, dynamic programming, survival analysis, resampling, and likelihood and Bayesian inference. The background material in these building blocks is summarized in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 and certain sections in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7. Besides group sequential tests and adaptive designs, the book also introduces sequential change-point detection methods in Chapter 5 in connection with pharmacovigilance and public health surveillance. Together with dynamic programming and approximate dynamic programming in Chapter 3, the book therefore covers all basic topics for a graduate course in sequential analysis designs.