Placebo defect. (Letters).In your article "Protein Pump: Experimental therapy fights Parkinson's" (SN: 4/19/03, p. 245), the possibility is mentioned that patients with Parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease or Parkinsonism, degenerative brain disorder first described by the English surgeon James Parkinson in 1817. When there is no known cause, the disease usually appears after age 40 and is referred to as Parkinson's disease. might have improved in the study bemuse be·muse tr.v. be·mused, be·mus·ing, be·mus·es 1. To cause to be bewildered; confuse. See Synonyms at daze. 2. To cause to be engrossed in thought. of the placebo effect placebo effect n. A beneficial effect in a patient following a particular treatment that arises from the patient's expectations concerning the treatment rather than from the treatment itself. rather than the administration of the protein glial-cell-line-derived neurotrophic factor. The article then says, "However, brain scans of these patients ... showed that dopamine dopamine (dōp`əmēn), one of the intermediate substances in the biosynthesis of epinephrine and norepinephrine. See catecholamine. dopamine One of the catecholamines, widely distributed in the central nervous system. supplies in the putamen putamen /pu·ta·men/ (pu-ta´men) the larger and more lateral part of the lentiform nucleus. pu·ta·men n. improved over that time," seemingly suggesting that such an increase in dopamine would not be likely to occur if the improvement were due to the placebo effect. But it seems entirely plausible and even likely, given that Parkinson's is caused by low dopamine levels, that the placebo effect would work through increased dopamine levels. To say otherwise seems dangerously close to saying, "The patients' health improved; therefore the placebo effect was not responsible for their improvement," which would, of course, be nonsense. BEN HALLER, REDWOOD CITY, CALIF. |
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