Placebo-controlled studies

Placebo-Controlled Studies

Placebo-controlled studies (pronunciation: pluh-see-boh kuhn-trohld stuhd-eez) are a type of clinical trial where the effects of a new treatment are compared with a placebo.

Etymology

The term "placebo-controlled" is derived from the Latin word "placebo", meaning "I shall please", and the English word "controlled", which refers to the act of exercising authoritative or dominating influence over.

Definition

In a placebo-controlled study, participants are divided into two groups. One group receives the treatment under investigation, while the other group receives a placebo. The placebo is a substance that has no therapeutic effect and is often used in clinical trials to test the effectiveness of a new drug or treatment. The participants, and often the researchers, do not know which group they are in to prevent bias. This is known as blinding.

Related Terms

• Clinical trial: A research investigation in which people volunteer to test new treatments, interventions or tests as a means to prevent, detect, treat or manage various diseases or medical conditions.
• Placebo: A substance that has no therapeutic effect, used as a control in testing new drugs.
• Blinding: A technique used in research to prevent bias by hiding the intervention from the patient, the clinician, or the researcher.
• Randomization: The process of randomly allocating the experimental units across the treatment groups.
• Double-blind study: A type of study in which neither the participants nor the researchers know which participants belong to the control group, nor the test group.

See Also

• Randomized controlled trial
• Single-blind study
• Triple-blind study

External links

• Medical encyclopedia article on Placebo-controlled studies
• Wikipedia's article - Placebo-controlled studies

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