The Placebo Effect Is Real, and Scientists May Be Able To Predict Who Responds

It’s well-established that placebo treatments, such as sugar pills, can prompt real reductions in symptoms for patients. But scientists have long struggled to understand exactly how the placebo effect works, and for whom. A small new study published in Nature Communications found that when some people with chronic back pain took a placebo sugar pill, their pain was reduced about as effectively as it would have been with pain medication. But the more novel finding, researchers say, is that people with certain traits reliably responded better to placebos than others — which could someday have significant implications for medical practice. “The standard line has been that placebo response is real, but it is not predictable,” says study co-author A. Vania Apkarian, a professor of physiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “That’s the classic viewpoint in the literature: that you cannot predict who will respond or how much they will respond. In fact, we can predict both of them.” Apkarian and his colleagues recruited 63 patients with chronic back pain for the study. Forty-three were given a sugar pill that they didn’t know was a placebo, and 20 got no treatment at all. No one received an actual painkiller. Over the course of about eight weeks, the individuals had periodic laboratory assessments, and tracked their daily pain on a smartphone app. About half of the patients who received the sham treatme...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthytime Innovation Health Research Source Type: news