Insights
The Power of Placebo & Trust for Pain Management
A growing body of work has demonstrated that pain perception can be modulated by social, cultural, contextual and interpersonal factors.1,2,3,4 Beyond this, patient trust in their doctor – an important component of the doctor-patient relationship – has been shown to positively influence patient health outcomes. A growing body of research is also showing that the placebo effects have
The placebo problem in pain: does baseline pain variability predict placebo response?
Recent reports have demonstrated a positive correlation between baseline pain variability and improvement in clinical trial patients receiving placebo, suggesting that patients with more highly variable reporting of clinical pain can be expected to have higher placebo response.
Patients are people: a new take on patient-centricity
If you ask a dozen people in the pharmaceutical / biotech industry what the term “patient-centricity” means, you’re likely to get a dozen different answers. These may include the mandate to listen to patients, caregivers, or advocacy groups to better understand the unique needs of a specific patient population. They may include ensuring that the outcomes measured
Predicting the placebo response in quality of life, sleep and fatigue
While significant placebo responses rates are often noted in clinical trials for indications like pain and depression, this issue can plague drug development in any therapeutic area – particularly in diseases that rely on subjective or patient-reported outcomes as primary efficacy endpoints. Quality of life (QoL) endpoints, for example, are often used to measure therapeutic efficacy in oncology clinical trials – but also in diseases like schizophrenia, pain, heart failure, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), allergy and pruritus.
Should strong placebo responders be excluded from clinical trials?
Using Predictive Modeling to understand the impact on assay sensitivity The placebo response is a heavily studied and historically challenging phenomenon for drug developers. Strong placebo effect diminishes the ability to distinguish efficacy of an experimental drug, leading to phase II and III trial failures1– even for otherwise effective drugs. Researchers have long devised strategies
How much of the measured treatment response in clinical trials is due to the placebo response?
Clinical trials measure efficacy of experimental therapies by comparing outcomes in patients receiving therapeutic interventions (treatment response) with patients receiving placebo (placebo response).