Patch Makes Certain Skin Cancers Disappear 90
kkleiner writes "What if treating skin cancer was just a matter of wearing a patch for a few hours? At this year's Society of Nuclear Medicine's Annual Meeting one group of researchers presented such a patch. The patch is infused with phosphorus-32, a radioactive isotope used to treat some types of cancer. In a study of 10 patients with basal cell carcinoma located on their faces, the patch was applied for three hours, then for another three hours four and seven days later. Six months after treatment, 8 of the patients were cancer free."
Re:Too Small A Sample (Score:5, Interesting)
A sample of ten is normal in medical terms.
I have participated in medical research as volunteer (mostly for trials on the uptake of drugs e.g. inhale vs. intravenous) and sample size was normally 6-12 patients. No more than that, I was told that such a sample size is large enough. Also costs are high of those experiments, which is an incentive to keep sizes small.
For such a first experiment, a group of ten patients sounds very reasonable to me. Now they can follow those patients for a while to see if there are any after effects, and if all looks good continue with larger trials, potentially making it a standard treatment for this cancer.