Update: Clinical Trial Enrollment Among Racial and Ethnic Minority Patients

Over thirty years ago, an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), stated that investigators do not seem to adequately take into account racial differences as a potential source of variability in trial results. In the majority of studies, the proportion of black subjects is less than their proportion in the general population, which led the authors to conclude that: “This underrepresentation in clinical trials suggests that insufficient data exist to accurately assess the safety and efficacy of many new drugs in American blacks.” 1