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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 3.7
         What can you conclude about Drug X?

You answered:

Selection A Drug X has analgesic efficacy similar to morphine and both are strongly effective analgesics.

Treatments were drug X and morphine. Drug X and morphine provided large amounts of pain relief, statistically similar to each other.

INCORRECT

It is not clear from these results if Drug X has analgesic efficacy similar to morphine and if both are strongly effective analgesics. When no differences between treatments are demonstrated, one remains unsure whether the study methods were adequate to have distinguished effective from ineffective analgesics. Although one expects that morphine would have some efficacy based on prior experience, it is possible that the study was poorly conducted and that the high pain relief scores for both drugs were due only to placebo effects.

Click here for advanced point about meta-analyses of analgesic clinical trials.

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