Disadvantages Of Factorial Trial Design

There are six methods used to analyse trial design; of which are discussed as follows.

Within-participants designs is when a researcher have all the participate in both levels of the independent variable and conditions. The strength of within-participants designs is that it does not require a large pool of participants and can also help reduce errors associated with individual differences. Each participant serves as his or her own baseline. One of the weaknesses is that the sheer act of having participants take part in one condition can impact performance or behavior on all other conditions. In between-participants designs, is an experiment that has two or more groups of subjects each being tested

There are multiple health concerns worldwide and more and more drugs are needed every day. Many drugs however, are extremely expensive to develop, test, and produce. According to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (2002), it costs up to $802 million to bring a new drug to the market. In 2002, pharmaceutical companies spent $34 billion in research and development (Center-Watch, 2003). In addition to the costs, the overall time from the discovery to approve and market the drug can take up to 15 years.

To start out, it is important to differentiate between practice and research, especially in this discussion of therapeutic research trials. Practice is meant to treat an individual in order to improve upon their quality of life. The practice of medicine generally yields good outcomes and is not inherently risky, with some exceptions. However, research on the other hand includes subjects or participants to learn something about people or a topic as a whole. While it seems that the differences are clear, there are many times when the lines between the two may blur. One of the ways that the differences are more ambiguous is in the case of

Clinical trials, or a test before a treatment is approved to be safe for human consumption, have been dated back to the biblical times. Recorded in the “Book of Daniel” a king and military leader performed the first known clinical trial (Evolution of Clinical Research). Although his experiment was nowhere near what we conduct in today's society scientist, doctors, and other researchers before them have learned through trial and error, and they have used clinical trials to study diseases. In 1774 James Lind followed through with the first clinical trial of the modern era studying scurvy.

The process used to pool the data together was clinical trial decision making. The main factors influencing this process consist of patient, provider, and treatment. Two studies specifically explored decision making by the patient. Education requirements impacted decision making since understanding the risks and benefits of clinical trials was the most important factor taken into consideration by the patient. Educational interventions were noted to have increased patient enrollment. (Biedrzycki, 2010).

(Adams M. , 2013). ?Before a drug is introduced, regulators demand controlled clinical trials (on carefully selected homogeneous samples); but, once a drug is widely in service, they fail to engage in systematic monitoring of what happens in everyday clinical practice, with ?real? patients.? (May, 2004).

The people in the studies must also be randomly assigned a "treatment" or a "placebo" (Kishita & Laidlaw, 2017, p.126) After these criteria were applied, the number of studies decreased to "15" (Kishita & Laidlaw, 2017, p.127). Information on "participants' age range and mean age, the type of treatment condition, the type of control condition, format of the therapy, the number of sessions, the primary outcome measure,the type of analyses, and means,standard deviations, and sample size for the primary outcome measure in each condition" was recorded for each study (Kishita & Laidlaw, 2017, p.127)

This is a non-experimental study. A non-experimental study is one that measures variables to determine if variables are related to one another. In this case the variables being measured are the guidelines of treatment and also the responses from the professionals that implement said guidelines. Using a non-experimental design is appropriate for this topic of study because a

The author believes that biomedical research is the way of better understanding medicine and without randomized clinical trials the field of medicine will have insufficient information. He argues that randomized clinical trials are the most scientifically sound and ethically correct means of evaluating new therapies. The belief of a physician being unethical when running randomized clinical trials is rejected by this article because previous trials on patients can have a better outcome on future patients. This article stresses that randomized clinical trials must be carefully designed that has an intended purpose of gathering data to improve the wellbeing of patients. If the patient is to endure a clinical trial he/she must be properly informed of the risks of the trial and the health of the patient should be high priority. Overall this article explains the importance of randomized clinical trials and debunks the idea of randomized clinical trials as being unethical. This article uses a utilitarian point of view and gives reasons why these trials can be in the best interests for both the patient and society.

The purpose of clinical development is to bring new drugs and therapies to patients. These drugs and therapies are studied and researched to be used for humans. Clinical development is very expensive and time consuming. The process of discovering a new drug, to having it approved for patient use, is approximately twelve years. The average cost to complete this process

While the steps to bring a new drug to market may seem extensive and costly, they are a necessity. Clinical drug trials provide options for people with diseases while also allowing doctors to improve the way they diagnose and treat these diseases. The process is long, but the benefits that new drugs have to offer, is

Gould et al (1999) trail was randomised however it was uncontrolled. This kind of clinical trial does not involve a control treatment. Any study that does not have a control group consisting of patients treated and followed up over the same time period as those in a treated group.

Randomized clinical trial (RCT) is the most effective way of conducting research on the efficacy and safety of newly developed drugs and medical treatment for public consumption. Like most experiments, there are usually two groups in conducting an RCT: the placebo group and experimental group. In the placebo group, the subjects receive a placebo drug or a drug that is already available and is used to treat a particular disease and in the treatment group, the subject receives the newly developed drug or treatment. However, in the RCT, the subjects that agreed to participate in the clinical trial are randomly assigned in either placebo or experimental group in order to eliminate observer bias and distribute the subjects’ variables evenly on all groups. Furthermore, RCT is either single-blinded or double-blinded. In single blinded RCT, the subjects cannot know if they are placed on placebo or experiment group. Moreover, the subject cannot know anything about the progress of the trial. As for the double-blinded RCT, both the subject and the physician-scientists who are conducting the trial do not know which subject are in which group and whether a particular treatment’s progress.

At the clinical site level, sufficient planning, time, money, effort and staff for recruitment are rarely adequate. There are a vast array of activities that the clinical staff need to attend to including training, identifying the study population, eliminating ineligible patients, and contacting potential participants through a variety of methods. Subject recruitment becomes even more difficult once the study is under way and actual study activities commence. In addition, as the cost of clinical research continues to rise, pharmaceutical companies are unwilling to provide the funds necessary to recruit effectively and the sponsors (pharmaceutical companies) are unwilling to reimburse the clinical sites for their effort. Subject recruitment has a direct impact on study retention. Clinical trials are dependent on people staying in the study until the very end. Without that subject retention, statistical analysis for safety and efficacy becomes nearly impossible. All of this starts with the pre-screening and recruitment of quality subjects for any clinical