Stratification (clinical trials)

Have you ever played with building blocks or Legos? Imagine if you had a bunch of Legos of different sizes and colors, and you wanted to build a tower. You might want to put the biggest Legos at the bottom and the smallest ones at the top so that your tower doesn't tip over. This is called stacking or stratifying your Legos.

Now, let's talk about stratification in a clinical trial. A clinical trial is a study where doctors and scientists try to figure out if a new medication or treatment is safe and effective for people. They need to test the treatment on different groups of people to make sure it works for a variety of people, like different ages or different health conditions.

When they are testing the treatment, they want to make sure that the groups of people who are getting the treatment are similar to each other in some ways, like their age or their previous health conditions. This is where stratification comes in.

The doctors and scientists will divide the people who are participating in the study into different groups based on certain characteristics, like age or gender. This is like sorting the Legos by color or size. Then, they will make sure that each group gets an equal chance to receive the treatment or a placebo (a fake treatment) so that they can compare the results.

By using stratification in a clinical trial, the doctors and scientists can make sure they are getting accurate results that apply to a variety of people. It's like building a tower with your Legos - you want to make sure everything is stacked up in a way that won't tip over.