Pediatric Clinical Testing

Everyday, children all over the world are treated for various physical and mental illness with drugs that have not been tested to work on people of their age. No doctors or scientists can tell parents if these drugs will work or even if they are safe for their children but when it all comes down to the problem at hand, the parents have no other option but to trust these drugs. This issue could be fixed. Pediatric clinical trials are a way to test these drugs directly on children. The issue arises when it is taken into consideration just how complicated this really is. Children develop and change so quickly and a single treatment may or may not be effective throughout a child's adolescence. This makes designing a test for a single drug far more

In reality, that is not the case at all. Therefore prescribing drugs to children as if they were adults and just adjusting it to their body mass is dangerous and potentially fatal for children. It is impossible to predict how these drugs will affect their brains and bodies. Many studies have been conducted to determine just how different children and adolescents are compared to fully developed adults. Children have a higher metabolic rate (Differences) meaning they process chemicals differently than adults. This is what makes it so hard to calculate dosage for children. Their bodies will deal with chemicals entirely differently than an adult will. This the the same reason that a child does not have to worry as much about gaining weight. Adults do not have the metabolic rate that children do. They do not burn off the energy from food as quickly as children so they more commonly gain weight from overeating. This same concept works with drugs. Children process drugs faster than adults so it is easier for them to overdose as the drug will release into their system at a much higher rate. This is not the only difference. On top of all of the physical differences, there are emotional differences too. “Children and adolescents are still developing, so their responses to similar situations will be different and experiences they have will impact on their future development.” (Differences) Children do not have a fully developed brain and do not have the proper decision making process or handling emotional stress. This is one reason why pediatric clinical trials are not more commonly performed. Participation in a clinical trials puts a child under a good deal of emotional stress and in some cases can be traumatic. What most people do not consider is that this is a reason why clinical trials are so important. Because undeveloped brains act so differently to drugs, they need to be tested more than ever,