Considering Joining a Myeloma Clinical Trial? Questions to Ask Your Healthcare Team.
Considering Joining a Myeloma Clinical Trial? Questions to Ask Your Healthcare Team. from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Considering participation in a clinical trial can bring up a lot of questions. Myeloma expert Dr. Melissa Alsina shares advice and key questions patients should ask their healthcare team before joining a myeloma clinical trial.
Dr. Melissa Alsina is an associate professor of medicine in the Blood and Marrow Transplant Program at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida where she also serves as head of the Multiple Myeloma Transplant Program. Learn more about Dr. Alsina, here.
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Transcript:
Katherine:
When a patient is considering participating in a clinical trial, what sorts of questions should they ask their healthcare team?
Dr. Alsina:
I think the number one thing is “How can this help me? What is the potential for this treatment?” The other very important thing is “What are the potential side effects? Has this been done before in other patients? Do you have any experience? What do you think are going to be the side effects or additional risk compared to getting the standard of care?”
And then, I think the third thing is “How much commitment do you need from me?” Because there is no doubt that clinical trials require a lot of commitment. When we are doing a clinical trial, we, for example, have to give all the drugs in the center, usually. Let’s say I’m testing Revlimid (lenalidomide), Velcade (bortezomib), and dexamethasone (Decadron) followed by CAR-T, for example in patients with high-risk myeloma. That’s one of the studies.
Yeah, you could get Revlimid, Velcade, and dexamethasone anywhere. Those are approved drugs. But if you are participating in a clinical trial, you have to get it at Moffitt or at the center, which means patients traveling back and forth, so that is very important because it requires a lot of commitment from the patients. And I think, on that line also, you can ask as a patient, “Well, what are the resources there in the clinical trial that can help me make that commitment?”
Frequently, clinical trials help patients by paying for their transportation, their gas, their accommodations if they have to stay overnight, to be able to comply and meet all those different visits.
