Key Questions Patients Should Ask Before Participating in a Breast Cancer Clinical Trial
Key Questions Patients Should Ask Before Participating in a Breast Cancer Clinical Trial from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What questions should breast cancer patients ask their healthcare team before entering a clinical trial? Dr. Adrienne Waks shares her advice and key questions that breast cancer patients should ask before participating in a trial.
Dr. Adrienne Waks is the Associate Director of Clinical Research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. To learn more about Dr. Waks click, here.
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Transcript:
Katherine:
What are some key questions patients should ask their healthcare team about participating in a trial?
Dr. Waks:
Yeah, I think there’s a couple of major ones. What’s the rationale behind this trial? Why do you think it might be better than the standard? What do I stand to gain in terms of effectiveness? Do you think it could be worse than the standard of care, and why or why not? So, basically, trying to capture well, what’s the rationale and the potential benefit of a trial? We’re always doing trials to try to give the patient some sort of benefits, so very reasonable to ask about that. Number two, of course, is what are the extra side effects that could be associated with participation on this trial, and how much do you know about them?
Is this a drug that you’ve used for five years in a different context or is it a pretty new drug and you don’t have a great sense, so number two, what are the side effects potentially associated with participation on the clinical trial? And then the third thing I would say is what is the extra burden on me going to be, not in terms of side effects but in terms of life disruption, time spent and things like that? What are those extra burdens going to be if I participate in a clinical trial will I have to get extra scans, will I have to do extra visits, will I have to get extra biopsies?
You know, there are a number of clinical trials that require biopsies or have optional biopsies at least because in addition to studying a new drug we’re trying to understand in whom does it work and in whom does it not. And so, we want to have biopsies to help us understand that, but a patient should obviously want to be informed about those biopsies.
So, what will the extra on me look like? And then, we always try as investigators in a clinical trial to put in place as best we can some ways to sort of mitigate the burden on patients. Like, well if I have to have a biopsy, can my parking be covered that extra day or what accommodations can be made to try to mitigate some of the disruption or the extra time? So, I would say those are sort of the three or four main things to ask about.
