Teenage cancer patients will die because of trial age limits which prevent them from testing new drugs, a charity has warned.
A new report published by the Teenage Cancer Trust has found that young people aged 13–24 are missing out on the chance to take part in clinical trials, leaving them unable to get innovative new treatments that could increase their chances of survival.
The report found that young people often find themselves too old to take part in pediatric trials and too young for adult trials.
They also don’t risk being killed by the treatments that don’t work. Bit of a swings and roundabouts thing.
The assumption being made is that these experimental treatments do, on average, work, which is why those not in the trials are missing out. Which is a fairly brave – in that ministerial sense – assumption, no?
I’ve got no option but to sell you all for scientific experiments.
Alternative story:
CHILDREN BEING USED IN DRUG EXPERIMENTS!
Either way they’ll be bitching. It’s a charity. That’s what they do.
Modern charities are run by CEOs who would make ideal capitalists. They spot a niche and poof! the Teenage Cancer Trust is born! The CEO and his/her mates take 6 figure salaries and monthly fact finding missions to far flung places for a couple of years until they can’t keep up the lifestyle (cirrhosis or ennui). I don’t recall my careers adviser at school a hundred years ago mentioning that one…
Of course, if they were eligible for the trials they could well end up in the control group getting placebos. Which I’m sure wouldn’t make the Teenave Cancer Trust very happy either.
In a (proper) double blind trial, only half of the participants receive the new treatment. And participants shouldn’t know whether they are getting treatment or placebo. There was a youngster on our local BBC news a few days ago saying that he was so delighted to have been selected to be part of a current trial…
For the covid drug trials thay excluded elderly volunteers and recruited only youngsters.
Given the age profile – known already at the time – this was pretty mad.
Very few teenagers get cancer so big Pharma would struggle to get enough guinea pigs for their cancer trials.
“Very few teenagers get cancer so big Pharma would struggle to get enough guinea pigs for their cancer trials.”
There’s a Danish group that works on the benefits and harms of vaccines. One advantage they have is that they gather their data mainly in W Africa where mortality rates are high enough that you can clearly discern the effects of the vaccines.
Summary: some save more than they kill, some kill more than they save.
Translation: the anti-vaccination nuts may be right about half the time. Which is a huge advantage over the line pushed by TPTB over the Covid jabs, where effectively everything the bastards told us was lies.
If the choice is between certain imminent death and an experimental drug that might maybe work, then give me the pills.
Taking the risk is the perosnal wealth optimising strategy.
Swannypol
I agree – that’s rather the point isn’t it: “If the choice is between certain imminent death“.
Ie, one of risk assessment, “honestly and transparently” communicated…. And if people demonstrably lie, that goes out the window, trust is increasingly screwed – which helps no one.
The reason for this is that body chemistry changes with age.
The point of a trial is not to save peoples lives but determine how many in the treated and untreated groups die. It is important to have a narrow and well understood group so that we are more likely to see a difference in the death rate. Including teenagers could result in a wasted trial.
This problem is well understood and organisations like Great Ormand Street hospital conduct specialist trials for childhood diseases.