So they’re not going to, they say in the information leaflet that you’re looking at twelve years from the beginning before there are any answers. They have sent out one newsletter which came last year, which is a couple of pages just saying, you know, how many people have been recruited and that recruitment had finished and how important the study is and so on. But it doesn’t give - well, you wouldn’t expect it to - give any more information than that. So, you know, I very much hope that the people who are organising this trial will communicate the results to the women who are taking part, at the same time as the results are published, because there have been too many occasions in the past of people actually reading the results of the study that they have been in and getting quite alarmed about them.
I think there is an ethical responsibility for people organising research to ensure that the participants actually do have this information first, because without them it wouldn’t have been possible to have it at all.
Can you remember if it said in the information anything about whether you would get information about the results?
It says that you will get information about the results, but it doesn’t say when. I mean it is quite tricky, you know, if you’re publishing the results in a, in a medical journal like the British Medical Journal. The timing of it is difficult and you can’t send the results out before the article is published. But there still must be, there are ways of ensuring that people do know what’s happening, and that they don’t run the risk of opening a newspaper or seeing an item on television which is reporting the results of the study and causing them consternation and alarm. That shouldn’t happen.
