Three-Armed Trials Including Placebo and No-Treatment Groups May Be Subject to Publication Bias: Systematic Review

Three-Armed Trials Including Placebo and No-Treatment Groups May Be Subject to Publication Bias: Systematic Review

BACKGROUND It has been argued that placebos may not have important clinical impacts in general. However, there is increasing evidence of a publication bias among trials published in journals. Therefore, we explored the potential for publication bias in randomized trials with active treatment, placebo, and no-treatment groups. METHODS Three-armed randomized trials of acupuncture, acupoint stim...

Spontaneous improvement in randomised clinical trials: meta-analysis of three-armed trials comparing no treatment, placebo and active intervention

BACKGROUND It can be challenging for patients and clinicians to properly interpret a change in the clinical condition after a treatment has been given. It is not known to which extent spontaneous improvement, effect of placebo and effect of active interventions contribute to the observed change from baseline, and we aimed at quantifying these contributions. METHODS Systematic review and meta-...

Systematic review of publication bias in studies on publication bias.

Acupuncture treatment for pain: systematic review of randomised clinical trials with acupuncture, placebo acupuncture, and no acupuncture groups

OBJECTIVES To study the analgesic effect of acupuncture and placebo acupuncture and to explore whether the type of the placebo acupuncture is associated with the estimated effect of acupuncture. DESIGN Systematic review and meta-analysis of three armed randomised clinical trials. DATA SOURCES Cochrane Library, Medline, Embase, Biological Abstracts, and PsycLIT. Data extraction and analysis ...

New law may be having some effect on publication bias.

P ositive trials get reported more often than negative trials, according to many studies. And despite efforts in the past decade to combat publication bias, it remains a substantial problem, according to two articles published last fall. One found that results had been published from fewer than half of the trials registered in the federal database, clinicaltrials.gov. The second article found t...