Clinical Trials (Still) Have a Race Problem. Where Do We Go From Here?

“Lack of racial diversity in clinical trials is not a new problem. As far back as 1986, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began to encourage researchers to include more minorities in their trials; by 1993, the Revitalization Act made inclusion of women and minorities a federal law for research funded by the NIH.

But the NIH funded less than 6% of all trials registered in 2014, and the Act didn’t apply to industry-funded trials administered by other organizations, such as pharmaceutical companies. What’s more, the language—frustratingly obtuse by requiring “inclusion” of racially diverse populations—did little to stem the lack of statistically significant presence of minorities in important clinical trials. ‘Representativeness in clinical trials is achieved when the proportion of trial participants with a given characteristic—be it Black race, older age, rural residence, disadvantaged socioeconomic status, or a number of other characteristics—roughly mirrors the proportion of persons with the condition of interest with that same characteristic,’ says Scott D. Halpern, M.D., Ph.D., the director of the Behavioral Economics to Transform Trial Enrollment Representativeness (BETTER) Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.”

Read more at HealthCentral.