European Medicines Agency (EMA) – the EMA is the part of the European Union that is responsible for approving and regulating human and animal medicines and medical products.
See: www.ema.europa.eu/en
Glossary
Selected words and phrases
specificity – when referring to the accuracy of a test result, specificity refers to the proportion of people who do not have an illness or disease who have a negative test result.
If a test has low specificity, the concern is over false-positive results – where people who to not have a condition are wrongly diagnosed as having it.
If a test has high specificity, then people who to not have a condition are correctly ruled out from the condition.
For a serious condition, high specificity is essential to prevent people being unnecessarily treated.
See sensitivity.
frequency – how often.
lesion – damage to a part of the body.
intent-to-treat analysis (ITT) and on-treatment analysis (OT) – two important ways that trial results are analysed. ITT includes all patients who entered the study and is more rigorous. OT only calculates the response rates for people still on the randomised treatment.