Double-blind trials

Double-blind clinical trials of oral cyclacillin and ampicillin.

A double-blind study was performed to compare the clinical response and the incidence of side effects in 2,581 patients administered ampicillin or cyclacillin for infections of the genitourinary or respiratory tract, infections of the skin and soft tissues, or for otitis media. There was no significant difference in clinical response and bacterial eradication. All side effects, including diarrh...

Nonathymulin in rheumatoid arthritis: two double blind, placebo controlled trials.

Two randomised double blind, placebo controlled trials have been carried out to assess the effectiveness of nonathymulin, a synthetic thymic peptide hormone, in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and to compare three different dosage schedules (1, 5, and 10 mg/day). Nonathymulin 5 mg proved to be the most efficient dose, providing significant clinical improvement as evaluated by the glo...

Double-blind active-control trials: beware the comparator you keep.

The indirect impact of the known comparator drug in double-blind comparative clinical trials of novel agents is underappreciated, despite its potentially pernicious effects. This hypothesis-generating analysis illustrates potential spillover effects of a comparator (amphotericin) in the evaluation of the first member (caspofungin) of a novel class (echinocandins) of antifungal drugs. Reported r...

Double-blind peer review.

Since Nature Nanotechnology launched in October 2006, our approach to peer review has been the same. We, like most science journals, use ‘single-blind’ peer review: that is, the referees of a paper know who the authors are but the authors don’t know who the referees are. We are now making a change to this process and will offer ‘doubleblind’ peer review — in which referees review a paper withou...

Double Blind Experiment