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The language of Clinical Trials
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For people with MS, especially those not responding to currently available therapies, clinical trials and research may provide early access to new treatments. Participating in trials also gives people with MS the opportunity to contribute to progress towards better treatments and a cure.
Clinical trials help to determine if a new drug, or other intervention such as surgery or physiotherapy, is safe and effective. They may be run by health professionals, researchers or the pharmaceutical industry. In all cases, trials must be approved by a human research and ethics committee (HREC) that reviews the trial protocol, the research evidence to support the trial and its potential risks and benefits.
Trial protocols are carefully designed using techniques such as ‘blinding’, ‘randomisation’ and placebo controls to guard against bias and ensure that the results can be accurately interpreted.
Placebos are a vital part of drug trials as it is well documented that doing anything in medicine can cause a strong, temporary, physiological response in the body – the ‘placebo effect’. For an intervention to be considered effective, it must show a significant effect over and above that seen in the placebo group.
Blinding is when patients, doctors and assessors do not know whether the patient is taking medication or placebo. This means that the effects of the intervention, including side-effects, can be objectively identified. Patients are randomly assigned to either the treatment or placebo group to avoid any bias in patient selection.
When the results are put together from several clinical trials that all rigorously follow these international ‘gold-standard’ methods, there can be a high level of confidence that a new treatment is safe and effective.
Always speak to your treating doctor before volunteering for a clinical trial.
For further reading about the clinical trials process visit;