Why are clinical trials needed?

In cancer, clinical trials are most commonly used to try out
new forms of treatment such as surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy, to control symptoms such as pain and sickness, or to test the effectiveness of psychological therapy.

The treatment being tested may be aimed at:

• improving the number of people cured (e.g. trying new types of surgery or chemotherapy)
• improving survival
• relieving symptoms of the cancer
• relieving the side effects of treatment
• improving the quality of life or sense of well-being for people with cancer.

Many drugs that have been tested in clinical trials are now in common use, such as tamoxifen for breast cancer and cisplatin for testicular cancer.

Without ongoing clinical trials it would not be possible to add to the current knowledge about effective treatments.

Clinical trials of a new treatment rarely stop when specialists agree that it works. There may be better ways of using it, such as giving it in different doses or combining it with other treatments. For example, a few years ago an important radiotherapy trial showed that lung cancer patients with chest symptoms could be treated just as effectively with two sessions as with 10 sessions of treatment. This discovery has made the treatment much more convenient for patients.

Clinical trials have also played a valuable role in testing ways of helping people cope with the emotional aspects of cancer.

Carrying out clinical trials is the only sure way to find out if a new approach to cancer care is better than the standard cancer treatments that are currently available. Without trials, there is a risk that patients could be given treatments which have no advantage, waste resources and might even be harmful to them.