Barriers to Eligibility and Enrollment Among Older Women in a Clinical Trial on Osteoporosis

Abstract

Recruitment efforts should address barriers to eligibility and barriers to willingness to enroll.

Recruitment and retention strategies in clinical studies with low-income and minority populations: Progress from 2004–2014

“…Higher rate of ineligibility mostly due to poorer attendance at the in-person screening session was the main factor leading to lower enrollment [33]. A clinical trial enrolling older women with osteoporosis also found that high-income residents were more likely to be eligible compared to those of lower incomes, African Americans were less likely to be eligible for medical reasons compared to non-African Americans, eligible Hispanics were more likely to be enrolled than non-Hispanics, and African Americans were equally willing to enroll as Whites [34]. Lastly, a cancer clinical trial analysis determined that African American patients are more often deemed ineligible to participate due to mental status or noncompliance with study requirements, and even when eligible, they more often refuse to participate [35].…”

“…Results regarding willingness to participate and/or volunteer for research studies revealed mixed results for African Americans [32,33] and only one study examined Hispanics [34].…”

Beliefs of Women's Risk as Research Subjects: A Four-City Study Examining Differences by Sex and by Race/Ethnicity

“…Indeed, several investigations have found no difference between racial/ethnic minorities and white people in willingness to participate in biomedical research, 1,27 and other investigators have found that racial/ethnic differences in biomedical research participation can be accounted for by differences in socioeconomic status. 28,29 When we controlled for differences in socioeconomic status among the three racial/ ethnic groups, however, the profound differences we found by race/ethnicity persisted: the odds of believing that women are more likely to be "taken advantage of" when they become subjects in a medical research project were almost 4 times as high for black respondents and 2.5 times as high for Hispanic respondents, compared to whites respondents.…”

Strategies and Cost of Recruitment of Middle-aged and Older Unmarried Women in a Cancer Screening Study

“…Consequently, we found no convenient distribution channels for targeting WPW with flyers or mailings, making these methods very labor-intensive and costly. Direct mass mailings have been shown to be effective in recruiting participants in other studies (38,46,48,(53)(54)(55)(56)(57)(58)(59). We bought a mailing list of Rhode Island home owners, requesting the names and addresses of unmarried age-eligible women.…”