Variability in Treatment-Seeking Cocaine Abusers for Clinical Trials

A chapter by Kathleen M. Carroll of Yale University discusses patient sample variability in pharmacotherapy trials for cocaine dependence. It argues that inconsistent findings across studies may be linked to variations in patient characteristics like cocaine use severity and depression rates. The text calls for standardized assessments and larger sample sizes to better understand treatment response.

Use Cases

• Identifying patient characteristics predictive of general treatment responsiveness based on severity of cocaine use and sociopathy.
• Evaluating patient-treatment interactions for specific pharmacologic agents based on rates of co-occurring conditions like depression.
• Designing meta-analyses of clinical trial outcomes based on consistently described study samples.
• Powering future clinical studies by estimating required sample sizes to detect patient-treatment interactions.

Strengths

• Authored by a researcher from Yale University, suggesting academic rigor.
• Focuses on a specific and challenging patient population: treatment-seeking cocaine abusers.
• Discusses multiple dimensions for evaluation, including severity of cocaine use and rates of depression.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Yale University

Collection Method

Likely compiled from clinical trial literature and research analysis.