What Are Some Medical Terminology You Should Know?

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Each day it seems like biotech companies release information that promises new drugs that it hopes will successfully treat terrible diseases, but a couple of these drugs have been tested in a handful of patients so far. According to Forbes, there are medical terms that you need to know, especially concerning experimental drugs; here is a list of medical terms that you need to know:

Case Report

This is a doctor’s report, which describes what has happened to individual patients. This is thought to be the weakest type of medical proof.

Clinical Trial

This is a medical experiment in which the patient is given a drug, medical device, food, surgery or any other treatment and followed closely to determine whether the therapy will be effective at treating ailments and also try to figure out the side effects of the administered treatment.

Data Safety Monitoring Board

This is an independent group of professionals who study the data from an ongoing trial meeting in order to ensure that no patient is being harmed. The monitoring board can choose to stop a study earlier if it is obvious that the new treatment will endanger patients or if it is highly efficacious, there is no point to continue trial.

Adverse Event/Severe Adverse Event

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearly describes “Adverse Event” as any unpleasant experience that is associated with the use of medical products in patients. This includes both clear drug side effects and other new health problems that crop up during a drug trial that may not even be drug related. A “severe adverse event” is believed to be serious if a drug causes the patient to become hospitalized, disabled or die.

Placebo

A placebo is a fake treatment or dummy drug that a patient believes may be the real thing. Though, placebos are most times used in drug trials, they can also be used in trials of medical procedures or devices.

Peer Review

When medical research papers are submitted to scientific journals, editors will send it to professionals within the field who anonymously search for issues in the analysis and conduct the research and overstatements or leaps of reason in the paper. A peer review basically recommends whether or not the paper should be rejected outright, accepted or sent back for revisions.

Post-Hoc

This refers to some data analysis, which was not planned ahead. Such analysis is often not taken into consideration as reliable particularly by statisticians. The FDA will not approve drugs that are based on such data.

Pre-Specified

Determined ahead of time: in clinical trials, every measurement and analysis is supposed to be set out prior to treating a single patient. Or else, a dodgy biotech researcher may just measure a lot of stuff and simply highlight the one that seems most positive at the end of the trial.

Secondary Endpoint

This term refers to measurements that are not the key goal of the trial. They are typically used as the supporting data about the drug’s efficacy or to spell out possible side effects.