Glossary of Clinical Research - F

F

• Follow-up

Monitoring a person's health over time after treatment. This includes keeping track of the health of people who participate in a clinical study or clinical trial for a period of time, both during the study and after the study ends. (NCI)

• Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services agency responsible for ensuring the safety and effectiveness of all drugs, biologics, vaccines, and medical devices, including those used in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of HIV infection, AIDS, and AIDS-related opportunistic infections. The FDA also works with the blood banking industry to safeguard the nation's blood supply. Internet address: http://www.fda.gov/. (NLM)

• Frequentist methods

Statistical methods, such as significance tests and confidence intervals, which can be interpreted in terms of the frequency of certain outcomes occurring in hypothetical repeated realisations of the same experimental situation. (ICH E9)

• Full analysis set

The set of subjects that is as close as possible to the ideal implied by the intention-to- treat principle. It is derived from the set of all randomised subjects by minimal and justified elimination of subjects. (ICH E9)