Anna Heath
Hospital for Sick Children & University of Toronto
Room: M3 3127
Bayesian Methods to Improve Clinical Trials for Children
Enrolling children into clinical trials can be challenging due to the relative rarity of diseases, ethical challenges with enrolling children into trials and lower willingness to engage in research for children and their families. Thus, many interventions that are currently used in practice have not been tested appropriately in children. In fact, around 80% of medications used in children’s hospitals are used off-label, meaning that they have not been approved for that indication. Bayesian clinical trials can be more flexible than standard clinical trial designs and they can incorporate external information to reduce sample size requirements. As such, novel Bayesian designs can be developed to address these key challenges in paediatric clinical trials and provide feasible clinical trials to evaluate medical interventions for use in children.