Abstract

Clinical trial recruitment sounds like it should be a job for the medics, not the mathematicians. But what if you already have access to decades of data about your prospective participants, and want to select those who you wish to invite to take part based on mathematical predication of how their disease will progress? In many dementia trials, the focus is upon patients who are asymptomatic or at an early stage in the disease. We would like to choose trial participants who are likely to benefit from the treatment. However, if our recruitment is too selective, we may not be able to say anything about the effect of the treatment in the whole population. Any strategy needs to balance the pay-off between these two factors