Clinical study design for individuals undergoing a procedure for peripheral artery disease

What is it about?

Individuals with leg pain from narrowing of a leg artery often need a procedure to open up the artery. What is the best medication after this type of procedure to maintain the benefits of the procedure? This type of study is challenging to do, and we highlight several lessons we learned from a study we attempted to perform but had to stop early because we were not able to enroll enough people in the trial.

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Why is it important?

Figuring out the best treatments and best practices in medicine requires well-designed clinical studies, all of which require the willingness of individuals to participate in these studies, along with smart study design, careful conduct of studies, and careful data analysis to reach valid conclusions. There are not many published papers describing the challenges of clinical studies because this is considered "negative data", but it is important for researchers to learn from these challenges so that they can be overcome and more well-conducted studies can be done in every area of medicine in which research is needed, to improve health for everyone.