Should My Child be in a Asthma Clinical Trial?
- Saturday, September 12, 2009, 12:31
- Asthma
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- Andrew:
- For someone with serious disease, does that argue then to enroll in a clinical trial, and are there clinical trials for children that would allow the use of these experimental medications?
- Dr. Martinez:
- There are many clinical trials going on for children nowadays. I’m involved in several of them. Certainly, they offer an enormous hope, but they cannot be applied to all children with asthma and should not be applied to children with asthma before we have done the adequately controlled studies.
My great concern is that people hear about these trials and believe that the medicines we’re using in these trials have already been proven to be effective in the sense we are testing them for, and that is not the case.
So, on the one hand, I’m excited about the new treatments that are available. On the other hand, I’m concerned that if people believe that they’re already proven to be effective, they may start using them at a time in which such a proof does not exist.
- Andrew:
- You’re on the leading edge of science, and it’s become increasingly complex, both the doors you’re beginning to unlock – you don’t have all the answers. What hope would you give for people who are living with this disease or their children are that they can have a good quality of life?
- Dr. Martinez:
- I would like to tell them the following. First, as I said a minute ago, we have effective treatments. If there are symptoms, there’s no reason to have them. Go to your doctor or demand to get better care if you’re still having symptoms in spite of the treatments that you’re being given, because I can assure you 99 percent of persons with asthma can lead perfectly normal lives.
On the other hand, I’m very excited that in the next 10 to 20 years we will crack this nut. We will understand what the causes of asthma are for the different forms of asthma, and we will be able to develop new treatments that will allow people who have the disease to say, “I can be cured” and will allow people at very high risk not to develop the disease.
I think that the new leads that we’re getting into will offer us that hope.
- Andrew:
- So, when we hear of increasing incidence of asthma and also increasing death from asthma, that’s a real tragedy because there were medical answers to help those people.
- Dr. Martinez:
- That’s the most important thing that I would like to stress. There are answers for the treatment of asthma today that are effective and that are safe, and people should know that in the first place. The fact that we don’t have cures and we don’t have ways to prevent it does not have to justify that people who have the disease do not have a normal life.
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