What exactly is "clinical research" and what are its methods?

[nowitspartytime]

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with many years in bench research (although disease focused), i want to shift to "clinical research" as a med student next year, preferably in surgery or so.
what exactly would that kind of research entail? what/how could i contribute? what are the methods used (i doubt pipetting or PCR?)? is it mainly just analyzing a bunch of data/outcomes?

 

[leeyuhang]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_research

 

[nowitspartytime]

don't get cute with me. I'm looking for someone's personal experience (preferably a medical student's)

 

[kami333]

It depends on the project.

It could be anything from reading charts and preparing case reports, to mining a database for retrospective studies or interviewing subjects for a prospective study, to analyzing samples from a clinical drug trial or analyzing individual samples such as performing in-depth intronic mutational analysis not done by commercial labs. In the past we've had med students drawing blood, reading charts, interviewing patients and taking their vitals; mainly making use of skills they would have learned or will use shortly.

 

[KLycos]

with many years in bench research (although disease focused), i want to shift to "clinical research" as a med student next year, preferably in surgery or so.
what exactly would that kind of research entail? what/how could i contribute? what are the methods used (i doubt pipetting or PCR?)? is it mainly just analyzing a bunch of data/outcomes?

Clinical researcher here. usually it involves recruiting patients for a clinical study. The tasks will include your boss (principal investigator) coming to you and saying he wants to do xyz. you will help draft the protocol and informed consent. you will be submitting to the IRB for approval, consenting patients for the study, following up with patients, collecting samples and performing whatever needs to be done on the patients in the study. and when the study is over analyzing the data. lots of stuff.

 

[LizzyM]

There two kinds: observational and interventional.

With observational, you are collecting data as a snapshot in time and/or following subjects over the long term to eventually test the hypothesis that a specific exposure is related to a specific outcome. This can be done retrospectively in a very short period of time (looking at data that's already been collected, sometimes collected in the medical record thus the term "chart review") or prospectively (collecting the data in real time and waiting for the outcomes to occur) -- these studies can go on for decades. One example would be the Nurses Health Study http://www.channing.harvard.edu/nhs/?page_id=70 and another is the Framingham Study http://www.framinghamheartstudy.org/about/index.html.

Interventional studies involve doing something to the subjects (intervention) and collecting data to determine the outcome. The ideal interventional study involves randomization (assigned by chance to one group or another), a placebo, and double blinding (neither the person measuring outcomes nor the subject knows which intervention was administered). Clearly, with some behavioral interventions, blinding the subjects is not possible. Drug and device trials are the most common interventional studies that physicians are involved in and are particularly common in cancer (usual care + placebo vs. usual care plus an experimental treatment), HIV, Hepatitis C, and a number of other conditions.

If your school offers research opportunities for medical students you may get a position working in an exisiting longitudinal study (collecting data from subjects) or do a retrospective chart review study to answer a specific question. Involvement in clinical trials tends to begin in fellowship training, from what I've seen.