A Mesothelioma case study is another type of medical study besides clinical trials. Unlike clinical trials, they are not intended to get approval for a treatment from the FDA; they are instead intended to add to what is know about a particular disease or condition. It is important to note that the reports of some studies are published in “peer-reviewed” sources; some are not. If material has been peer-reviewed, that means that it has been read critically by other people in the same field as the people who wrote the material. The best sources for information will be material that has been peer-reviewed.
One kind of medical study is a case study, which is, in broad terms, a systematic analysis of a particular series of events. In the context of mesothelioma study, it is generally a study of cases of mesothelioma cancer. A case study could look at an individual case of the disease, or it might look at a group of patients who have the disease. If it looks at a single patient, it may be a review of the patient’s history with the disease, including symptoms, what kinds of tests were performed and why, and what kind of treatment regimen was followed. This kind of case study can be very helpful in documenting rare versions of a disease to help other doctors in their diagnosis and treatment. It can also be helpful when the disease itself is rare, like mesothelioma.
A mesothelioma case study can also be a report on an experiment. For example, one group of patients may be given a new treatment, and the results compared with a group of patients that received the traditional treatment. Another example of a case study is where researchers look at medical records for a group of patients, perhaps to look for evidence of a factor that hadn’t been considered before. Or it might be a “meta-analysis” – a study that puts together the results of two or more earlier studies to gain new insight.
The best place to look for information on mesothelioma case studies is the PubMed web site, which is provided by the National Library of Medicine, part of the NIH. You can search the web site for information on a specific illness using keywords. For example, if you wanted to see information on mesothelioma case studies, but wanted to concentrate on cases that occurred in the peritoneum, you could use “peritoneal mesothelioma” as your search terms, and get a list of all of the studies that contain those words. Likewise for other cancer conditions that you may be seeking reach material on.
The PubMed web site is at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
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