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Book Review
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Received: ,
This article was originally published by Wolters Kluwer - Medknow and was migrated to Scientific Scholar after the change of Publisher.
Children are not miniature adults, and paediatric psychiatric disorders are rather different in nature from adult psychiatric disorders; hence, psychopharmacological intervention strategies cannot be simply extrapolated from adult to paediatric practice. To treat children safely and effectively, therefore, separate clinical trials need to be conducted in children and adolescents. Such trials pose challenging ethical, scientific and regulatory problems to investigators, and these are the focus of the book under review.
The book is organized into 13 chapters. These chapters discuss the history of paediatric psychopharmacological research, paediatric clinical drug testing research with special focus on regulations in the USA and the European Union benefits to the pharmaceutical industry for conducting drug trials in children and adolescents and contemporary needs in child and adolescent psychopharmacology. There are also special chapters devoted to ethics, study design and methods, challenges in recruitment, safety management and special challenges in conducting paediatric psychopharmacological research. Other than these, topics such as practical issues in conducting clinical trials, receiving feedback from patients and caregivers, and publication of data have also been discussed.
The contents of the chapters are well organized into sections and sub-sections. There are plenty of tables and boxes that are easy to read and will be helpful for a student in the requisite field to revise. All chapters are well referenced.
The blurb on the back cover states that the target audience of the book includes but is not limited to paediatricians, healthcare professionals, researchers, principal investigators, pharmaceutical company personnel and ethics committee members. However, the contents of the book are predominantly oriented to the needs of the pharmaceutical industry, to those who design and monitor clinical trials, and to those who are concerned with regulatory and legal aspects of research in the field. Furthermore, the contents are more targeted towards readers in the USA and the European Union, where most of paediatric psychopharmacological research is designed and conducted. However, the potential target audience in India would be the Indian pharmaceutical industry which inturn is interested in American and European markets for their products.
