| They are doing their bit to attract volunteers for important trials testing new drugs and existing treatments.
Ninewells Hospital-based Professor Tom MacDonald plays a leading role in the “Get Randomised” campaign.
He said it was difficult recruiting enough people for clinical trials, and it was hoped that putting local faces on TV to make a direct appeal might improve the situation.
“If we write out to 100 people, there will be about 30 replies back,” he said.
“People don’t seem really interested, which makes life very difficult if you are a researcher.
“I think people don’t actually appreciate we make decisions based on the results of trials.”
To assess treatments, researchers want to do more studies involving people suffering a variety of ailments.
They believe the best way to do that is through trials that split participants randomly in to two groups — those that get the drug under test and those that get a placebo.
Professor MacDonald said randomised trials were “the cat’s pyjamas” of clinical trials.
These techniques, developed over years, make trial results more reliable.
But studies have repeatedly shown that investigators almost always show some sort of bias when allocating people to treatment groups.
This is a fundamental problem that can lead to trials having completely unreliable results — even showing a treatment to be beneficial when it is actually harmful.
The solution is to allocate the treatments randomly.
When this is done properly, the differences in how the groups fared will reflect only how successful or otherwise the new treatment was against no treatment.
Nowadays, this is all done by computer, ensuring the process is completely random.
Professor MacDonald said it wasn’t possible in the space of a brief TV advert to explain the process, but using the slogan “get randomised” was designed to make people ask what it was all about and become interested in finding out.
Other local medics appearing on the small screen are Dr Alex Watson, a GP at Westgate Health Centre, Ninewells-based breast cancer surgeon Professor Alastair Thompson, cardiovascular specialist Professor Jill Belch and cancer specialist Dr John Dewar. |
