SYSTEMS FOR CLINICAL TRIALS

摘要

The invention provides methods and systems for assessing the efficacy of a pharmaceutical which is putatively disease modifying of a cognitive disorder, for use in the treatment or prophylaxis of that cognitive disorder, the method comprising the steps of: (1) stratifying a subject group into at least 2 sub-groups according to a baseline indicator of likely disease progression, (2) treating members of each subject group with the pharmaceutical for a treatment time frame, (3) deriving psychometric and optionally physiological outcome measures for each treated patient group, (4) comparing the outcomes at (3) with a comparator arm of said sub-groups which is optionally a placebo or minimal efficacy comparator arm, (5) using the comparison in (4) to derive an efficacy measure for the pharmaceutical. The methods and systems of the invention address problems such as low rate of decline over the treatment time-frame of patients who have mild-disease severity at baseline and biased withdrawal, particularly in the placebo/comparator treatment arm.