How to Search for Clinical Trials

The National Institutes of Health, or NIH, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, defines a clinical trial as a prospective behavioral or biomedical research study of humans designed to answer specific questions about behavioral or biomedical interventions. Clinical trials test whether certain treatments are safe, what side effects they have, if any, and whether new treatments are better than the available standard treatments. Searching for clinical trials helps prevent essentially identical trials being performed more than one time.

Instructions

• 1

  Go to the link provided in the Resources section of this article. The link will take you to the database of clinical studies that the National Institute of Health (NIH) has developed in partnership with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), other federal agencies and private industry. As of January 2011, the database contained 101,283 trials, conducted in all 50 states and 174 countries.

• 2

  Type the word or phrase that describes the clinical trials you are interested in. To search for multiple words or phrases, use the "AND" (all upper case) conjunction.

• 3

  Click "Search." After the search is complete, click on the headline of the trial you are interested in to get more details.