Hi everyone, I'm currently designing a study in which participants will either receive a dose of liquid acetaminophen (aka paracetamol) or a placebo. Since the liquid medicine we'll be using is cherry flavored, my plan is to use cherry-flavored syrup for the placebo group. But I worry that cherry syrup might not taste enough like medicine to serve as an effective placebo. Are there any flavors I could add to the placebo syrup that would give it a more medicinal quality? Thanks for your help!
You should make it a little bit acidic to mask the taste of the acetaminophen or rather, using an orange flavour.
In my knowledge I would suggest not to change the flavour but to adjust as much as possible to the flavour of the test product.
There are much data showing that flavour condition response to treatment. i.e. if you administer favour associated to an active principle for a periodo of time and then only flavour you can measure similar responses even if the active principle is not any more administered.
This of course depends on the clinical study design. For a cross- over this is highly recommended. For a between-patients design (i.e. parallel-groups) this is not mandatory but recommended.
If masking the taste will turno not feasible a "pseudo-placebo" can be used, i.e. acetaminophen dose below the threshold for therapeutic effect.
Hoping this may be useful.
Lancet Neurol 2016; 15: 736–47 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1474-422(16)00066-1
Article The placebo–nocebo response: Controversies and challenges fr...
Doi: 10.1552/physrev.00043.2012
Changing or not flavour does not mean that you are not having a placebo effect, the idea is make it more palatable.
To make it more palatable, placebo taste is good enough as the changing or not flavour does not mean that you are not having a placebo effect. Thanks to above scientists.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Clinical Pharmacology
- Dosing