By Bayla Rothschild, Staff Writer
The placebo effect is a well-known and heavily studied concept that is often employed during medical studies to compare the effect of someone receiving a real treatment with another individual receiving a placebo treatment or drug. A placebo is a fake medical treatment that looks like the actual treatment being tested, but in reality has no medical effect. The placebo effect occurs when an individual receives a placebo treatment and has a positive outcome from it. The goal of this comparison is to examine whether or not the treatment is actually effective, by contrasting the results of those who got the treatment with those who got the placebo. Studies that employ a placebo aim to determine if a medical condition is improved due to the experimental treatment or due to thinking that the treatment was supposed to help them. To simplify, the hope is that the researchers will be able to figure out why the participants’ health improved.
Usually, the group members getting the placebo believe they were receiving a real medical treatment. But what happens if the placebo group knows that they are receiving a placebo? How do both types of placebo groups compare, and how do the placebo groups contrast with a group that does not receive any treatment or placebo at all?
A study conducted by the University of Milan recruited participants by advertising itself as a study about vitamins that were being tested to see if they support healthy aging. From the advertisements, 110 people volunteered. From the initial volunteers, the researchers selected a group of 90 participants between ages 65 and 90 with an average age of 77.01 years and a standard deviation of 7.48 years.
Once the participants were determined to be a good fit for the study, they were divided into three groups. The groups were established as follows: open-label placebo, deceptive placebo and a control group. The open-label placebo group was told that they were going to be given the placebo in the form of a sugar pill. This group was also told that previous studies have shown that people taking a placebo, when aware that this is what the treatment is, often had positive results similar to the group that was given the medication. The deceptive placebo group was given the placebo pill, but was told that the pill was a vitamin being tested to see how effective it is at supporting healthy aging. The control group was told that the researchers were testing how the effects of aging occur, and that they would be given a set of tests that day and another set in a few weeks to examine various effects of aging.
All three groups were then given a set of tests regarding many effects of aging. The participants came back three weeks later to repeat the same tests. The tests fell into two categories: the subjective tests included the topics of stress, psychological well-being, daytime sleepiness, fatigue, optimism, self-efficacy, and aging stereotypes; the objective tests were based on cognitive performance and physical functioning. Some of the tests had multiple sections testing specific areas within the category. The results from both sets of tests from each group were synthesized, compared and analyzed.
Overall, the study found that the open-label placebo group had a statistically significantly lower level of stress than both of the other groups at the end of the study. No noticeable differences were found between groups in terms of psychological well-being, daytime sleepiness, fatigue, optimism, self-efficacy, or aging stereotypes. The physical functioning of the open-label placebo group and the deceptive placebo group both improved over the course of the study, but did not change for the control group. The final area in which there was a noticeable difference between the groups was in terms of digit span remembrance which is one of the tests under the category of cognitive performance. In this area, differences were found in that by the end of the study the open-label placebo group did the best, the control group the worst and the deceptive placebo group was in the middle.
Interestingly, beyond the mentioned statistics, the open-label placebo group consistently had the same results or better ones than the deceptive placebo group. When synthesizing all of this information, it seems that the knowledge that one is receiving a placebo as a treatment may benefit one’s health more than not knowing that what one is taking is the placebo. The small sample size of this study means the results are not fully proven. However, the results join a growing body of literature that seems to support the idea that placebos can be beneficial even when the person taking it knows what it truly is. Finally, the success of this study opens new avenues to future treatment of aging with an open-label placebo.
With the constant research towards medical advancement that occurs in today’s world, it is fascinating to realize that sometimes knowing that the treatment one is getting is truly a placebo can still help that person’s health improve.
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