Getting Older Patients to Participate in Clinical Trials

Older patients often don't participate in clinical trials. School of Health Sciences Assistant Professor Patricia Wren and her collaborators have attempted to find ways to assist investigators in planning surgical trials that successfully enroll and retain older women. Their paper "Enhancing Participation of Older Women in Surgical Trials" (Journal of the American College of Surgeons, volume 207, pages 303-311, 2008) compares the difficulties in getting younger versus older women to participate in two surgical trials to treat patients with pelvic organ prolapse. They found "it was more difficult to recruit older research participants...[but they] did not have higher dropout rates than younger participants."