Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.

[hunter]

For your cynical enjoyment:

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.

<snip>

...MK-869 wasn't the only highly anticipated medical breakthrough to be undone in recent years by the placebo effect. From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo. Despite historic levels of industry investment in R&D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007—the fewest since 1983—and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.

The upshot is fewer new medicines available to ailing patients and more financial woes for the beleaguered pharmaceutical industry. Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson's disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo. A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn's disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an "unusually high" response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.

http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all

I'm going to hazard an educated guess that nothing about placebos has changed... It's much more likely that the pharmaceutical companies were lying and deluding themselves about the effectiveness of their products, but now that they face growing scrutiny for their past mendacity and profiteering they can't so easily hide the real data.

[imdjh]

1. "beleaguered pharmaceutical industry" yeah right

Some people might conclude that people who improve when taking placebo aren't really sick.

[TZ]

6. These are from clinical trials

NOT DRUGS ON THE MARKET>>ARRGH! It means that the drug is ineffective. What people are missing is this has nothing to do with drugs already on the market. CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION!!

[Jim__]

8. You say it's not drugs on the market.

But the article clearly states that this higher placebo effect is seen for drugs that are already on the market:

It's not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

It's not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

[shraby]

2. My first thought is that the drug companies had poor drugs

in the first place..ones that didn't work but thought they could shove them through anyway and make a bundle of cash from it.

[hunter]

3. The drugs were effective. They made money.

What's health got to do with it?

[windoe]

4. Drug companies doing their own testing on placebos?

They can't figure out why no drug is better than theirs? These big pharma news releases are hilarious.

[TZ]

5. Umm NO! Drug companies are doing PLACEBO CONTROLLED

trials with their drugs. Since no one on DU seems to have a clue what is involved with experimental design/null hypothesis, the most likely reason this is happening is because the methods of testing placebos is getting more and more sophisticated. It has nothing to do with drug makers hiding results or some magical effect. What it does show is that there is a whole bunch of stuff being tested and a certain percentage of which is ineffective (ie placebo like).
In my job we can actually QUANTIFY the amount of drug in a system and match it up with patients reaction. I can assure you that this is real data and if we didn't find the expected results no one is going to waste valuable resources continuing.


God damn it. Even the science forum is full of scientific illiteracy..:banghead:
More studies...more failure rates...Its that simple folks!!
And the drugs that "work" are making people healthier thats why they work!!! :grr:

[ZombieHorde]

7. If "no one on DU seems to have a clue what is involved with experimental design/null hypothesis,"

and you are on DU, then you don't seem to have a clue what is involved with experimental design/null hypothesis.

Your logic is faulty! Time for some red smilies! :mad: :redbox: :smoke: :grr: :banghead: <--- See how red these smilies are!?

[Duer 157099]

9. Did you know this?

Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524911.600-13-things-that-do-not-make-sense.html?full=true

[cutlassmama]

10. Prozac was good when it first came out in the market

then it went to generic and turned to doo-doo. After 10 years of being on Prozac the generic didn't work on me.

Perhaps it has more to do with "generics" then than the original drugs themselves.

[FiveGoodMen]

11. Only if the generics aren't really the same drug

In that case, it's just plain fraud.

[Nihil]

12. Adaptation?

The body adapts to all sorts of things over time and the mind can
override a lot of what the body does so maybe the combination
of the two would account for your observation?

:shrug:

[didact]

13. People are changing.

Some know what I mean.