A.B.
Senior Member
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I believe they did. This 2001 paper appears to be the actual study.
No it's not.
It's https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9270567
Anyway, I spotted another methodological issue
Definition of placebo-associated improvement. There are no established definitions of placebo effect in PD, and clinical descriptions of PD emphasize that motor function can vary over hours or days even in the unmedicated state. 11,12 Because there was only one baseline evaluation for each enrolled patient, and visit-to-visit variability in both PD and the UPDRS is not well defined, we purpose-fully chose a rigorous definition of placebo-associated improvement. With agreement by the majority of investi-gators involved in the study, we defined placebo-associated improvement as a reduction in the UPDRS total motor score of at least 50% or a change of 2 points on at least two different motor items of the UPDRSm from the base-line scores. Because the protocol permitted placebo- and drug-treated patients to receive “rescue” intervention with carbidopa/levodopa if clinical function declined, patients no
longer could be classified with placebo-associated improvement once this therapy was introduced.
Patients who got significantly worse were effectively removed from the analysis.
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