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Once you've decided that participating in a clinical trial could prove beneficial to you, there are other factors to consider that might affect your participation.
Each study has its own guidelines for who can participate, called eligibility criteria. Generally, participants in a study are alike in key ways, such as the type and stage of cancer, age, gender, or previous treatments. The eligibility criteria are included in the study plan. To find out if you are eligible for a particular study, talk to your doctor or the doctor or nurse in charge of enrolling patients in the study.
If you were to participate in a clinical trial, you might receive your treatment at a large cancer center, a university hospital, or your local medical center or physician's office.
Depending on the type of trial and on the intervention it's designed to study, the trial may include participants at one or two highly specialized centers or it may involve hundreds of locations at the same time. You would participate in the trial under the guidance of a team including your physician and other health professionals, who would report your experience with the treatment back to the center responsible for the trial's overall coordination. Experts then use the information from all the participants to evaluate the intervention that the trial is testing.
Even if you have health insurance, your coverage may not include some or all of the costs associated with a clinical trial. This is because some health plans define clinical trials as "experimental" or "investigational" procedures. Because lack of coverage for these costs can keep people from enrolling in trials, the National Cancer Institute is working with major health plans and managed care groups to find solutions. In the meantime, there are strategies that may help you deal with cost and coverage barriers. For more information, see:
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