Asthma patients may respond just as well to placebo treatment as they do to real treatment, a new study suggests.
These findings came from a pilot study at Harvard Medical School which was funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In order to test the placebo effect on asthma patients, researchers had 39 patients cycle through four treatment options. They either got the inhaler treatment albuterol, an inhaler with no medicine, a fake acupuncture treatment, (they were told it was real), or no treatment.
Patients receiving no treatment said their symptoms improved 21%, but patients receiving a placebo treatment improved by much more – 45% when they received the placebo inhaler and 46% with the fake acupuncture. Patients who received albuterol improved 50%.
According to the researchers, when the patients assessed their treatments, “the placebo effects were equivalent to the drug effect,” the Los Angeles Times quoted.
However, the results also suggest that patients can’t be relied upon to make accurate reports of whether their symptoms are getting better. Patients in this study couldn’t tell when the albuterol was making a real difference. All three groups who thought they were receiving treatment reported a significant difference in how they felt, but the reality was that patients taking albuterol helped their lungs push out 20% more air, while the placebo treatments only produced a 7% increase in lung capacity.
“Even though there was a large, objective drug effect that was nearly three times the effect of the two placebos and the no-intervention control,” the authors wrote, as quoted by the Los Angeles Times. “Patients could not reliably detect the difference between this robust effect of the active drug and the effects of inhaled placebo and sham acupuncture.”
