Today marks the end of Clinical Trials Awareness Week, but that doesn’t stop the need for raising awareness about the importance of clinical trials!
Clinical trials play a critical role in medical research and without them, innovative discoveries and breakthroughs wouldn’t make it to the patients that need them. Unfortunately, clinical trials are often under-enrolled—37 percent of clinical trials don’t enroll enough patients to move forward, and 11 percent fail to enroll even one patient.
Under-enrollment is an especially significant problem among older adults, who are also those most disproportionately impacted by chronic disease. For example, even though more than half of all cancers are diagnosed in people ages 65 and older, only 25 percent of cancer-focused clinical trial enrollees are from that age group.
The importance of including older adults in clinical trials was also reported in a recent New York Times article, which featured a quote from Alliance President and CEO Sue Peschin.
To learn more about clinical trials, watch the “pocket film” below and visit our health resource page!
