Cancer survivors may be able to manage the extreme fatigue they experience after treatment by knowingly taking a placebo pill, according to researchers at University of Alabama at Birmingham and Harvard Medical School.
After treatment, cancer survivors still experience extreme fatigue with few treatments available on the market to help these former patients deal with exhaustion, and the best treatments to alleviate fatigue have many side effects, including panic, psychosis, and heart failure. However, cancer survivors may be able to manage their fatigue by knowingly taking a placebo pill, according to researchers at University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and Harvard Medical School.
A study published in Nature Scientific Reports found that cancer survivors who were advised to take placebo pills reported a 29% improvement in fatigue severity and a 39% improvement in fatigue disrupting the quality of life.
“Cancer survivors report that fatigue is their most distressing symptom, even more distressing than other symptoms like nausea or pain, and clinicians struggle to find ways to help them with it,” Teri Hoenemeyer, PhD, lead author and director of Education and Supportive Services at the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center in a press release. “The effects of the placebo pills on fatigue were so dramatic that we had a number of the study patients ask if they could be given more placebo pills. For ethical reasons, we were unable to do so.”
74 survivors of different types of cancer who reported feelings of fatigue were included in the study. Half were assigned a pharmacological treatment while the other half knowingly took two placebo pills, twice per day, for three weeks.
“Participants still had benefits three weeks after they stopped taking the placebo pills, which hasn’t been shown before,” explained Kevin Fontaine, PhD, co-author and chair of the Department of Health Behavior in the UAB School of Public Health. “The extension of benefits even when the placebo pills are discontinued has been a surprise finding that has many placebo researchers excited.”
Patients who were treated as usual were given the opportunity to take placebo pills for another three weeks while the placebo group stopped taking the pills. Both cohorts found a reduction in their fatigue after the study.
“Some people who thought the placebo wouldn’t do anything had a good response; others who believed it would help didn’t have a response,” said Hoenemeyer. “Fooling or deceiving patients may be unnecessary for placebo effects to produce benefits, with automatic neurological processes being a possible mechanism for the effects. This has revolutionary implications for how we might exploit the power of placebo effects in clinical practice.”
References
Hoenemeyer TW, Kaptchuk TJ, Mehta TS, Fontaine KR. Open-label placebo treatment for cancer-related fatigue: a randomized-controlled clinical trial. Scientific Reports. 2018. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-20993-y. Published online February 9, 2018. Accessed February 19, 2018. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-20993-y.
Standard Criteria for Loss of Ambulation Needed in DMD
April 19th 2024A recent study suggests the differences between ambulation definitions for patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) can impact the identification of ambulant vs nonambulant individuals, and standard criteria across settings are needed.
Read More
Government agencies have created an online portal for the public to report potential anticompetitive practices in health care; there are changes coming to the “boxed warning” section for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapies (CAR T) to highlight T-cell blood cancer risk; questions about the safety of obesity medications during pregnancy have arisen in women on them who previously struggled with fertility issues.
Read More
Oncology Onward: A Conversation With Penn Medicine's Dr Justin Bekelman
December 19th 2023Justin Bekelman, MD, director of the Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation, sat with our hosts Emeline Aviki, MD, MBA, and Stephen Schleicher, MD, MBA, for our final episode of 2023 to discuss the importance of collaboration between academic medicine and community oncology and testing innovative cancer care delivery in these settings.
Listen
Gene, Light Therapy Combo Shows Promise Against Prostate Cancer Cells in Proof-of-Concept Study
April 18th 2024In their preclinical model, the researchers found efficacy both in vitro and in vivo by using CRISPR-Cas9 to mimic porphyria and combining the technology with light therapy.
Read More
Pegcetacoplan for PNH More Cost-Effective Than Anti-C5 Monoclonal Antibodies
April 18th 2024A cost-utility analysis conducted from the perspective of the Italian health system found that pegcetacoplan was more effective and less costly than 2 complement 5 (C5) inhibitors for the treatment of paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH).
Read More