Tests a success

• By JOHN BOYD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Apr 20, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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For the past 36 weeks, someone has been experimenting on Clarence Johnson Jr.

Johnson is only vaguely aware of what is being tested, but since its beginning, he has been run through a gauntlet of questions and exercises, the results of which he’ll probably never fully know.

He has been monitored, measured, now discarded and he couldn’t be any happier about the whole thing.

“I feel good,” Johnson said, “and I’ve lost 10 pounds.”

Johnson recently finished his fourth clinical trial at Pennington Biomedical Research Center.

It won’t be his last, he said.

In his first trial, Pennington helped diagnose him with Type 2 diabetes. In his most recent one, the center helped him manage it.
For Johnson and other volunteer participants at Pennington, clinical trials are a win-win.

The medical community gets to poke, prod and question its participants with the hope of finding the next medical breakthrough.

The participant gets free access to care, regular visits with a health professional, sometimes free food and exercise facilities, often improved health and in most cases a little bit of pocketbook motivation to boot.

Dianne Cosey, a participant in the Hart-D diabetes study, dropped two dress sizes in the first nine weeks of her study.

The study requires her to work out three times per week at the Pennington exercise facility. It could be argued that the exercise, not the clinical setting, helped her lose the weight; that she could have experienced the same results at home or in a gym without Pennington’s assistance.

But many patients say it’s the structure of the trial — having something to which they hold themselves accountable — that helps them where a basement treadmill couldn’t.

“Here I’m disciplined,” Hart-D participant Pat Aupied said. “Some people need discipline, and I am one of them.”