Treatment & Prevention

Types of Cancer Clinical Trials: Treatment and Prevention Trials

Many cancer clinical trials test new treatments or ways of giving treatment. Some clinical trials look at ways of preventing cancer. Of these, some prevention trials are designed for people who have never had cancer; others are looking for ways to prevent cancer from recurring in patients who have already had the disease.

• If you are at high risk because of a family history of cancer, you may want to consider participating in a prevention trial.

• If you have cancer, you may want to participate in a clinical trial of an experimental treatment.

Clinical trials test new adjuvant treatments, additional treatments given after primary treatment (which is usually surgery) to decrease the risk of a recurrence. This may then be followed by an adjuvant treatment: chemotherapy, radiation, hormone therapy, biological therapy, or a combination of these.

Clinical trials also test new neoadjuvant treatments, which are therapy given before cancer surgery. Examples of neoadjuvant therapy include chemotherapy, radiation therapy and hormonal therapy.

Typically, a treatment trial compares a new type of treatment to the standard treatment. Other clinical trials test the effectiveness of new types of cancer surgery or methods of imaging.