Placebo responses, reduction

When the placebo cream had not been applied, the researchers found activation in areas of the brain that they identified as the pain matrix . But when the same pain stimuli were administered with the placebo cream, activation in these pain-responsive regions of the brain was reduced, and the more pain relief the subjects reported, the greater the reduction of activation in the pain matrix. This told Wager that people actually do experience less pain when given placebo analgesics, and this change in experience is accompanied by changes in brain activity. 

The largest juvenile, controlled trial of a TCA reported favorable results with DMI in 62 clinically referred children with ADHD (Biederman et al., 1989). Many of these children had previously failed to respond to psychostimulant treatment. Sixty-eight percent of DMI-treated patients were considered very much or much improved, compared with only 10% of placebo patients (p < 0.001), at an average daily dose of 5 mg/kg. In a further analysis, neither comorbidity with conduct disorder, depression, or anxiety, nor a family history of ADHD yielded differential responses to DMI treatment (Biederman et al., 1993b). In addition, DMI-treated ADHD patients showed a substantial reduction in depressive symptoms compared with placebo-treated patients. 

A second reversible MAOl, brofaromine, was studied in a double-blind, placebo-controlled fashion by Den Boer et al. (1994). Thirty patients with symptoms meeting DSM-III-R criteria for social phobia were studied for 12 weeks. Those individuals deemed as having a positive response were continued for an additional 12 weeks. Brofaromine was found to be superior to placebo in the reduction of both anxiety and avoidance behaviors by week 8. 

E. Therapentic response One study in MS patients demonstrated a 31% reduction in annual exacerbation rate, from 1.31 in the placebo group to 0.9 in the Betaseron 0.25 mg group. The proportion of patients free of exacerbations was 16% in the placebo group, compared with 25% in the Betaseron group. Over the 2-year period, there were 25 MS-related hospitalizations in the Rctoscron-treated group compared to 48 hospitalizations in the placebo group. 

E. Therapeutic response Improvement in labored breathing and sputum clearance are indicative of a therapeutic response to Pulmozyme. In a well-controlled trial, Pulmozyme, compared with placebo, resulted in signihcant reductions in the number of patients experiencing respiratory tract infections requiring use of parenteral antibiotics. Within 8 days of the start of treatment with Pulmozyme, mean forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEVl)... 

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