Attitudes of Patients in Developing Countries Toward Participating in Clinical Trials: A Survey of Saudi Patients Attending Primary Health Care Services

Abstract

The results of this study revealed that patients in Saudi Arabia have a low awareness and are less willing to participate in clinical trials. Different motivational factors and awareness programs can be used to increase patient participation in the future.

Attitude of Asian Parkinson Patients towards Clinical Research and Tissue Donation

“…Forty-three percent of our participants believed that participation in clinical research was too risky for them compared to 80% of Saudi Arabian and 48% of Indian participants [2,10]. As the patients in our study did not particularly mention the risks they feared, these possibly could be the fear of unknown or of potential side effects.…”

“…As researchers are faced with the problem of patient participation in research globally, understanding the barriers limiting patients' interests in research is important in designing future research projects that ensure participant satisfaction and recruitment. While extensive work has been done to evaluate Western patients' perspectives, there have been only few studies representing Asian patients' attitude towards research participation, which could be due to lack of patient or physician interest as well as limited funding and infrastructure to promote research [8,9], while various Asian studies have been performed to assess attitudes of healthy subjects or mixed group of patients towards research participation [2,6,[10][11][12][13][14]; to the best of our knowledge, this is the first Asian study on Parkinson patients to understand their attitudes towards clinical research and tissue donation.…”

“…Despite understanding the possible risks involved, our study revealed that 48% of patients were willing to participate in clinical research, with an even higher number of patients willing to contribute blood (72%) or urine/stool (71%). As opposed to the Omani, Saudi, and Indian patients, the Singaporean population was found to be better aware and educated about research [1,2,6,10]. Participants understood the importance of research in development of current medical knowledge, and majority trusted medical facilities in guarding their safety and privacy, whereas previous Asian studies have identified a general mistrust towards government and medical facilities in conducting ethical research and protecting patient confidentiality [7,11].…”

“…is continues to be a prevalent challenge against advancement of medical knowledge through research. Recently observed trends have depicted low rates of participation in clinical research and tissue donation, especially amongst Asian populations [1][2][3].…”

“…Often cited reasons for not participating in research studies include (1) inconvenience and discomfort, (2) lack of trust on trial medicines, treating doctors, or hospital facilities, (3) lack of information about research, (4) family's refusal to allow participation, and (5) uncertainty or fear of the unknown [4,5]. Asian countries such as Oman, Saudi Arabia, and India showed interest rates of 59%, 30%, and 46%, respectively, for participation in clinical research [1,2,6]. A comprehensive review by Wai et al has summarized the findings of 18 different studies that evaluated experiences of patients regarding their prior research participation and the influence of that on consenting to reuse of leftover tissues for future research.…”