Brain, Vol. 122, No. 12, 2413,
December 1999
© 1999 Oxford University Press
Book reviews |
DICTIONARY FOR CLINICAL TRIALS.
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Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Western General Hospital, Crewe Road, Edinburgh, UK
Neurology, traditionally a specialty without any effective treatments, has, in the past decade, entered the era of clinical trials and evidence-based medicine with a bang. A plethora of randomized controlled trials have evaluated treatments for stroke, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, movement disorders, neuropathies and beyond; the list covers the whole of Clinical Neurology. Neurologists need to know about clinical trials, but as the author explains in the introduction, clinical trials have a language of their own. For the uninitiated, this dictionary will be a useful starting point in learning that language. It is a small pocket-sized book, and so it is not comprehensive and the entries are not exhaustive. It is therefore difficult to know exactly who it is aimed at. For the completely uninitiated, it will undoubtedly be a useful document.
For those with some knowledge, the brevity of the entries will undoubtedly be frustrating at times. Obviously, it is not designed to be read through from cover to cover. However, on dipping into it here and there, the layout is clear, graphs are used appropriately to illustrate certain points (though the graph of a uniform distribution—a blank page—is a rather arcane sort of statistical joke). It is a single-author book, and although other people have commented on the book, Simon Day takes the responsibility for its content. Inevitably, some of the entries I would personally have liked to have seen in the dictionary are not there (Cochrane Collaboration, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, the uncertainty principle, to name a few). For anyone involved in clinical trials, it is becoming a sine qua non to look at the Cochrane Library to see whether systematic reviews of the intervention to be tested have been performed in order to ensure the question has not already been answered, and to inform the design of future trials. Perhaps this reflects the fact that Simon Day works in the pharmaceutical industry, and the book goes into greater depth in areas relevant to trials of pharmaceutical agents. Perhaps these omissions could be dealt with in a second edition. Although it is quite a useful little book, its price tag of nearly £20 means that it does not represent wonderful value for money. A non-random survey of junior research clinicians (the presumed target audience for this book) revealed that they share my view that they might well not invest in this book personally as a result of its price. Nonetheless, despite its flaws, this is a welcome addition to the clinical trials literature which I hope will go some way to making the field more accessible to the uninitiated.
Notes
By Simon Day. 1999. Pp. 217. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Price £19.99. ISBN 0-471-98596-1.
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