Changing the World

Welcome to another edition of Riding in Cars With Researchers! I am Dr. Jeff Kingsley and I want to change the world! We are doing a two-part series about changing the world. In this episode, we are talking about high-quality research protocols that go off the tracks.

Sometimes there is great research that actually doesn’t produce the result we wanted to find. It doesn’t give us the answer that we sought simply due to the inefficiencies in research today. A perfect example of that just happened approximately two months ago. Cardiac stents are collapsible straws that you can put in an artery, and when expanded it holds the artery wider so you can include blood flow to the heart muscle. We have decades worth of great data to show that patients that are acutely ill, patients who are having a heart attack, patients who are having chest pain, greatly improve with cardiac stenting. But there is conflicting data on patients who aren’t acutely ill right that minute. We can see that the patient has a blockage, they have hardening of the arteries, but are not symptomatic. There is conflicting data on whether or not putting cardiac stenting in improves their outcome.

Inefficiencies in Research

In 2011, some brilliant researchers designed a well-designed protocol to give us the definitive answer to the question, “Should we put stents in asymptotic patients who have a blockage?” They received funding from the National Institute of Health (NIH) and after five years of trying they had only found 5,000 patients for their research trial. They needed 8,000 patients. After 5,000 patients they had to change their research protocol. They were looking for patients from all over the United States. Millions of patients who could meet the criteria for this research trial. After five long years of trying, and lots of money, they had to change the scientific protocol to be able to be able to salvage some benefit from all that work as they were running out of time and money.