clinicaltrials.gov

I just wanted to tell you about a helpful web site called clinicaltrials.gov. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), through its National Library of Medicine (NLM), has developed clinicaltrials.gov in collaboration with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as a result of the FDA Modernization Act, which was passed into law in November 1997.

The site is a database of over 93,000 clinical trials sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, other federal agencies, and private industry. There are studies from all 50 states and over 170 countries. It offers up-to-date information for locating federally and privately supported clinical trials on various diseases and conditions.

If you, or someone you know, has a disease or condition, you might want to check out clinicaltrials.gov to see if you qualify for a clinical trial. Each trial has inclusion and exclusion criteria, e.g., many trials only accept patients who have gone through conventional treatments that were not successful.

In the advanced search form, you can enter specific search parameters such as state, study type, age of patient, etc. It's a very useful site, especially if you've exhausted all other treatment options.