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Trial Design: Pain Sections
Author Bio
Introduction
Placebo Effects
Currently selected section: Single Dose Trials
Repeated Dose Trials
Explanatory Versus Pragmatic
Dose-Response
Parallel Group Versus Crossover
Conclusion
 

 

Chapter 1: Clinical Trials of Pain Treatment: Single Dose Trials: Question 3.5
        

What can you conclude from these results?

You answered:

Selection BThis study demonstrated no assay sensitivity, so no conclusion can be made about the efficacy of Drug X.

Treatments were placebo, drug X, and morphine. All three provided modest amounts of pain relief, statistically similar to each other.

CORRECT

Morphine was presumably chosen as the positive control here because it produced pain relief in similar patients in many previous studies. The failure to show a difference between morphine and placebo most likely indicates a flaw in study execution, which makes the lack of a difference between Drug X and placebo inconclusive.

 

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