PMID: 16634462Apr 26, 2006Paper

Treating Alzheimer's disease: do clinical trial methods produce unnecessary practitioner dilemmas?

American Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementias
Robert E Becker

Abstract

Recent clinical trials and critical reviews of Alzheimer's disease (AD) research discourage already relatively sparing clinical uses of cholinesterase inhibitors (ChEIs) considering the prevalence of AD. As evidence against use of this class of drugs, detractors cite critical reviews of ChEIs and lack of long-term health benefits found in one long-term clinical trial. This paper describes the use of standard error of measurement to allow investigators to design clinical trials that address these issues. The new clinical trial procedures afford sufficient precision for two purposes. First, practitioners can assess individual patients with precision and certainty in their observations. Second, clinical trial researchers can study how short-term drug effects on individual patients predict long-term benefits from continued treatment. With these more clinically informative clinical trial designs, investigators would be able to avoid uncertainties currently raised by conflicts between short- and long-term AD clinical trials.

References

Nov 1, 1975·Journal of Psychiatric Research·M F FolsteinP R McHugh
Nov 13, 1986·The New England Journal of Medicine·W K SummersA Kling
Feb 1, 1967·Annals of Internal Medicine·A R Feinstein, N Koss
Apr 20, 2001·JAMA : the Journal of the American Medical Association·D MoherUNKNOWN CONSORT Group (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials)
Apr 20, 2004·Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry·K Rockwood
Aug 6, 2005·BMJ : British Medical Journal·Hanna KaduszkiewiczHendrik van den Bussche

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Citations

Jan 15, 2009·Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology·Robert E Becker, Nigel H Greig

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