How do our medications come to be? This is a question that many of us wonder as we unscrew the caps to our pills every day. What have these medications been put through to prove that these medications are safe for our consumption? In the event that these medicines do in fact end up on our shelves it means that these dugs have gone through rigorous clinical research. The pharmaceutical companies admit to spending 1.43 trillion dollars a year on these various studies. What are the steps of a clinical trail? Well here is a little more in regards to what exactly a clinical research trial is and how phase 1 drug trials influence the medication that we are prescribed daily.
There are typically four key phases to clinical trials. Each one of these trails measures what is good about the drugs and what needs to be reevaluated in order to better the prescription for you. Often time you will see ads asking for people to participate in paid depression studies, epilepsy studies, smoking and other paid clinical studies, even sleep studies have clinical trails to test and see how safe and good they are for their consumers. Here are the four phases of these drug trails.
Phase 1 drug trails
Phase 1 drug trials are the first trails that these future prescripts are put through. Recruiting a small group of healthy people, this group is used to test the safety of the product. Phase 1 drug trials measure what the correct dosage for an individual is and what the side effects are so that you don’t have to find out for them. These trails can be risky, but for the most part due to the small group of people they are well monitored throughout the entire process to provide the best potential care.
Phase 2 clinical trial
A phase 2 trial is often extended to include more individuals. These individuals are more so tested for the effectiveness of the drug as apposed to the safety of the drug (like was the main focus within the phase 1 drug trials). The data obtained within the phase 2 trails study how the drug works on the individual conditions and still how the individuals react to the medications they’ve been given.
Phase 3 clinical trial
Phase 3 is when more information about the effectiveness of the drug comes in. Now, in this stage the drug has been given to anywhere from several hundred individuals to a few thousand. At the end of this trail the FDA must then decide if the results are positive or negative.
Phase 4 clinical trial
The final part of these clinical trails come in phase four. Now given to a larger population, the FDA monitors to see how these drugs fair over a longer portion of time. For years these medications are carefully watched for side effects, benefits, and overall usefulness. After three long steps, this final stage can last for years, in fact in many cases even medications you take daily are being observed as part of a clinical trial still.
These clinical trails are to allow the FDA and the general public to get a better sense of what these medications are doing. In the long run, it is the clinical research that goes into all of these meds that make it so that you can take them safely and without worry of what they may be doing to your system. Of course, every medication comes with risks, but if they are found out and contained before the drugs are put on shelves than once they are already in the hands of the general public.
