What are the Implications of Recruitment Source (“Clinical” or “Non-Clinical”) in Schizophrenia Trials for Successful Recruitment and Retention in Terms of Screen Failure, or Non Completion of Trial?
Recruitment is one of the greatest challenges in performing randomized controlled trials. It is a common understanding that people with schizophrenia are especially difficult to recruit into trials, and that drop out rates in drug trials with people with schizophrenia have been reported to be as high as 65.9%.
Unmet medical needs lead to added pressure to develop new drugs as quickly as possible. This often results in challenging recruitment timelines. As a result, recruitment strategies often move beyond the traditional, clinically-driven approaches that focus on a Principal Investigator´s (PI) patient pool and their clinical network (referred to as Clinical source), towards strategies such as online recruitment, community outreach approaches, selfreferral and other approaches (hereafter termed collectively as ´Non-Clinical´ recruitment source approaches).
Whilst these approaches bring more potential participants to a study, it has not been clearly established what implications there are in terms of randomization rates and retention/study completion rates. This poster examines whether research participants recruited from Clinical and Non-Clinical sources differ in two aspects - levels of study randomization and of study retention/completion.
