Showing posts with label placebo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label placebo. Show all posts

Thursday 24 December 2015

The Placebo Effect Is Maintained Even While Informing The Patient

The Placebo Effect Is Maintained Even While Informing The Patient.
Confronting the "ethically questionable" drill of prescribing placebos to patients who are unknowing they are taking reprint pills, researchers found that a group that was told their medication was fake still reported significant symptom relief. In a analysis of 80 patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a control group received no therapy while the other group was informed their twice-daily pill regimen were placebos. After three weeks, nearly enlarge the number of those treated with dummy pills reported adequate symptom relief compared to the hold back group.

Those taking the placebos also doubled their rates of improvement to an almost equivalent level of the effects of the most authoritative IBS medications, said lead researcher Dr Ted Kaptchuk, an associate professor of medication at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. A 2008 deliberate over in which Kaptchuk took part showed that 50 percent of US physicians privately give placebos to unsuspecting patients.

Kaptchuk said he wanted to find out how patients would react to placebos without being deceived. Multiple studies have shown placebos make use of for certain patients, and the power of positive thinking has been credited with the suspect "placebo effect. This wasn't supposed to happen," Kaptchuk said of his results. "It undeniably threw us off".

The test group, whose average age was 47, was on the whole women recruited from advertisements and referrals for "a novel mind-body management study of IBS," according to the study, reported online in the Dec 22, 2010 appear of the journal PLoS ONE, which is published by the Public Library of Science. Prior to their indefinite assignment to the placebo or control group, all patients were told that the placebo pills contained no realized medication. Not only were the placebos described truthfully as lackadaisical pills similar to sugar pills, but the bottle they came in was labeled "Placebo".

Thursday 19 March 2015

Another Layer Of Insight To The Placebo Effect

Another Layer Of Insight To The Placebo Effect.
A altered inspect - this one involving patients with Parkinson's disease - adds another layer of acuity to the well-known "placebo effect". That's the phenomenon in which people's symptoms improve after taking an listless substance simply because they believe the treatment will work. The small study, involving 12 people, suggests that Parkinson's patients seem to pet better - and their brains may actually change - if they meditate they're taking a costly medication. On average, patients had bigger short-term improvements in symptoms peer tremor and muscle stiffness when they were told they were getting the costlier of two drugs.

In reality, both "drugs" were nothing more than saline, given by injection. But the haunt patients were told that one drug was a new medication priced at $1500 a dose, while the other charge just $100 - though, the researchers assured them, the medications were expected to have alike effects. Yet, when patients' movement symptoms were evaluated in the hours after receiving the modify drugs, they showed greater improvements with the pricey placebo.

What's more, MRI scans showed differences in the patients' understanding activity, depending on which placebo they'd received. None of that is to mean that the patients' symptoms - or improvements - were "in their heads. Even a condition with objectively regulated signs and symptoms can improve because of the placebo effect," said Dr Peter LeWitt, a neurologist at Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital, in Michigan.

And that is "not classy to Parkinson's," added LeWitt, who wrote an essay published with the study that appeared online Jan 28, 2015 in the daily Neurology. Research has documented the placebo effect in various medical conditions. "The duct message here is that medication effects can be modulated by factors that consumers are not aware of - including perceptions of price". In the box of Parkinson's, it's thought that the placebo effect might shoot from the brain's release of the chemical dopamine, according to study leader Dr Alberto Espay, a neurologist at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

Sunday 1 February 2015

Extension Of Receiving Antiviral Drugs Reduces The Risk Of Lung Rejection After Transplantation

Extension Of Receiving Antiviral Drugs Reduces The Risk Of Lung Rejection After Transplantation.
Extended antiviral healing after a lung shift may ease prevent dangerous complications and organ rejection, a new study from Duke University Medical Center shows. A proletarian cause of infection in lung transplant recipients is cytomegalovirus (CMV), which often causes emollient effects but can be life-threatening for transplant patients. Standard preventive therapy involves taking the sedative valganciclovir (Valcyte) for up to three months. But even with this treatment, most lung transplant patients come about CMV infections within a year.

The Duke study included 136 patients who completed three months of voiced valganciclovir and then received either an additional nine months of placebo (66 patients) or an additional nine months of vocalized valganciclovir (70 patients). Since it was a double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized study, researchers compared two groups of randomly selected patients at 11 novel centers (one troop of which received the additional medication and a control party that received the placebo, with neither the researchers nor the participants knowing who was in the control group). Researchers found that CMV infection occurred in 10 percent of the extended remedying group, compared to 64 percent of the placebo group.

Sunday 3 August 2014

New Blood Thinner Pill For Patients With Deep Vein Thrombosis

New Blood Thinner Pill For Patients With Deep Vein Thrombosis.
A experimental anti-clotting pill, rivaroxaban (Xarelto), may be an effective, within and safer healing for patients coping with deep-vein thrombosis (DVT), a pair of new studies indicate. According to the research, published online Dec 4, 2010 in the New England Journal of Medicine, the deaden could sell a new option for these potentially life-threatening clots, which most typically mode in the lower leg or thigh. The findings are also slated for presentation Saturday at the annual joining of the American Society of Hematology (ASH), in Orlando, Fla.

And "These study outcomes may maybe change the way that patients with DVT are treated," study author Dr Harry R Buller, a professor of prescription at the Academic Medical Center at the University of Amsterdam, said in an ASH announcement release. "This new treatment regimen of oral rivaroxaban can potentially come to blood clot therapy easier than the current standard treatment for both the patient and the physician, with a single-drug and honest fixed-dose approach".

Another heart expert agreed. "Rivaroxiban is at least as effective as the older treat warfarin and seems safer. It is also far easier to use since it does not require blood testing to mediate the dose," said cardiologist Dr Alan Kadish, currently president of Touro College in New York City.

The about was funded in part by Bayer Schering Pharma, which markets rivaroxaban maximum the United States. Funding also came from Ortho-McNeil, which will market the drug in the United States should it pick up US Food and Drug Administration approval. In March 2009, an FDA admonitory panel recommended the drug be approved, but agency review is ongoing pending further study.

The authors note that upwards of 2 million Americans wisdom a DVT each year. These lap clots - sometimes called "economy flight syndrome" since they've been associated with the immobilization of large flights - can migrate to the lungs to form potentially deadly pulmonary embolisms. The in vogue standard of care typically involves treatment with relatively well-known anti-coagulant medications, such as the viva voce medication warfarin (Coumadin) and/or the injected medication heparin.

While effective, in some patients these drugs can stir unstable responses, as well as problematic interactions with other medications. For warfarin in particular, the possibility also exists for the development of severe and life-threatening bleeding. Use of these drugs, therefore, requires consuming and continuous monitoring. The search for a safer and easier to administer curing option led Buller's team to analyze two sets of data: One that corroded rivaroxaban against the standard anti-clotting drug enoxaparin (a heparin-type medication), and the second which compared rivaroxaban with a placebo.