Is the control group in research projects control group or are healthy volunteers healthy?

Is the control group in research projects control group or are healthy volunteers healthy?

Oral presentation

Nasie Asipova, Tsvetomir Deliyski
Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy, University of Sofia “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Sofia

The broad definition of health proposed by the WHO more than 50 years ago states: "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not just a lack of disease or disability." Most healthcare providers and healthcare professionals have adapted this broad view of health and now include measures for the overall impact of the disease and its treatment. In addition to physical functioning, the overall concept of Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) also includes other health aspects called domains, such as psychological and social functioning that are important to the patient. HRQoL tools can be used to detect undiagnosed or undetected diseases such as, for example, depression. The most common tool used is Short Form-36. The SF-36 consists of 36 questions for a multi-purpose study of the patient's overall health status developed by the WHO. Purpose: To create experimental conditions for selecting healthy volunteers by assessing the health status of 5th grade pharmacy students by self-assessment of their condition, refracted through the HRQoL tool SF-36, in four main domains: Physical functioning, Social and Behavioral functioning, mental health, and general perceptions of health (assessment of respondents for their general health). We interviewed students of pharmacy from the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy of Sofia University using the Free Licensing Program SF-36v2® Health Survey OPTUM version 2016. The research included 26 students aged between 22 and 25 , distributed equally between men and women, after duly informed consent and introduction with the conditions for completing the questionnaires. Data is processed statistically with the specified program. The results obtained showed serious deviations from the norms for the functioning of healthy volunteers in the four functional domains and posed a series of questions as to how to select control groups from healthy volunteers for randomized controlled clinical trials.