Dr.. Osama Abu Al-Rub
A medical study is a scientific practice that has specific controls aimed at obtaining information about medical practice, diagnosis, treatment, medical sciences, pharmacology, and related sciences, and contributes to understanding a specific disease or testing a behavioral or pharmacological treatment.
There are several types of medical studies, and choosing the type of study is an important aspect in the design of medical studies, and the type of study that can best answer the research question must be chosen.
It should be noted that even if the medical study is correct and reliable, it remains a study, that is, no treatment decisions are based on it, and usually dozens of studies cooperate to eventually lead to an official recommendation from medical institutions such as the World Health Organization and others.
Sometimes the conditions of studies that are relied upon to make general judgments may not be applicable in real life. For example, in a study that linked chocolate (whose benefits are attributed to containing the antioxidant flavanol) with lowering blood pressure, participants were given an average of 670 milligrams of chocolate. flavanols;
In reality, a person will need to eat about 12 bars of dark chocolate per day, and each bar weighs 100 grams (meaning that a person must eat 1.2 kilograms of chocolate per day) or drink about fifty packages of milk chocolate, which is unreasonable and impossible to implement.
What is true is that you discuss any study with your doctor, and do not make any treatment or preventive options solely based on it.
Medical studies can be divided into two types: primary research and secondary research.
Primary studies, including three types:
- Basic medical research.
- Clinical research.
- Epidemiological research.
As for the secondary studies, they include reviewing a large group of primary studies and collecting them to obtain more comprehensive and accurate results, and the types of research review (reviews) and “meta-analyses”.
Here we provide an overview of these studies
basic studies (basic medical research ) includes animal experiments, cellular studies, biochemical, genetic and physiological analyses, and studies of drug and substance properties.
One of its limitations is that its results may not apply to humans or in the normal conditions in which humans live, because it is conducted in the laboratory and on animals or cells.
clinical research (clinical research ) It is the research that is conducted on humans, and it is divided into interventional (experimental) studies and noninterventional or observational studies.
Examples of experimental clinical studies are studies that investigate the clinical, pharmacokinetic, or side effects of drugs, as well as examining the absorption, distribution, and metabolism of a drug.
Laboratory studies also include studies of medical devices and studies in which surgical, physical and psychotherapeutic procedures are examined in contrast to clinical studies.
In non-interventional studies, the researcher observes an existing treatment regimen exclusively according to medical practice, and not according to a predetermined study protocol.
The goal of an interventional clinical study is to compare treatment procedures within a group of patients, which should show as few differences as possible. This is achieved through measures such as:
Random distribution of patients into groups in order to avoid bias in the results.
- A control group that does not receive treatment or receives a placebo.
Blinding is another way to avoid bias, and there are two types: single blinding, where the patient is not aware of the treatment they are receiving, and double blinding, where neither the patient nor the researcher knows which treatment is being planned.
Randomized, blinded clinical trials are considered the gold standard for testing the efficacy and safety of treatments or drugs.
There are legal and ethical controls for interventional clinical studies, such that the study is registered by the responsible authorities and must be approved by, and also approved by the responsible ethics committee.
The study must be conducted in accordance with the binding rules of good clinical practice, and consent must be obtained from the subjects participating in the study.
epidemiological research (epidemiological research ) aims to investigate the distribution and temporal changes in the frequency and causes of diseases, and is an adjective that describes a particular disease or condition.
Examples of epidemiological studies include studying a sample from a region in a particular country, or a population, ethnic or age group, such as studying the relationship of obesity in a particular country to certain cancer rates.
Among the epidemiological studies:
- Follow-up studies (cohort studies), which include observing two healthy groups of people, and one group is exposed to a certain substance and the other is not, such as a study of chemical factory workers compared to workers who are not exposed to chemicals, and recording the incidence of lung cancer over a future period of time in the two groups and comparing them.
- Case control studies, which include comparing cases of people with a certain disease with people who are not sick, and a retrospective analysis is performed.
- Cross-sectional studies, which examine the prevalence of a particular disease or condition at a specific time.
A medical study should always be published in a peer reviewed journal.
For the non-specialist reader, he should pay attention to the following issues when reading studies or what is published about them on media websites, newspapers, channels, etc.:
- What is the site that published the study? Is it an ancient and serious media site? Is it the site of a global health organization such as the World Health Organization, or a little-known blog site or company site?
- Is the site known for publishing accurate scientific materials? For example, there are sites known to adopt conspiracy theories, for example, “Ebola virus disease is a conspiracy to sell medicines,” and “The US Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) hides the fact that aliens exist.”
- If the site that transmitted the information is accurate, you should look at the news itself. For example, where was the study published by the site, in a well-known medical journal such as The Lancet? Or is the study still under review and has not been accepted for publication?
- Beware of words that are used such as “the magic cure revealed” .. “Finally … the secret that your doctor will not tell you” .. These sentences are usually within unreliable materials.
- If the news is about a study on a drug, you can go back to the source and make sure that it exists, because some news is fabricated and the study was not originally published or even non-existent.
- Who was the study conducted on? Mice or humans? And how many? This gives you an impression of the extent of the research before you go to tell your friend that a cure for diabetes has been found.
- Beware of news that makes claims too good to be true: a cure for diabetes has been discovered.. An engine design that reduces fuel consumption by 90%.
- Even if the medical study is correct and reliable, it remains a study, that is, no treatment decisions are based on it, and usually dozens of studies cooperate to eventually lead to an official recommendation from medical institutions such as the World Health Organization and others.
- What is true is that you discuss any study with your doctor, and do not make any treatment or preventive options solely based on it.