Word: placebo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Researchers at six universities across the U.S., led by Dr. Steven DeKosky at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, report that elderly people taking ginkgo supplements showed no notable differences in scores on brain-function tests from people taking placebo pills. The team, which published its results Tuesday, Dec. 29, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, tested volunteers on a range of tasks, including memory, attention, language, and visual and spatial constructions, and found that the extract from the ancient tree did little to slow the decline of these functions. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
...helped inhibit oxidative damage to brain neurons caused by free radicals found in pollutants or made as a by-product of many metabolic processes. But if ginkgo were working in this way, says DeKosky, he and his team would almost certainly have detected a difference between the treatment and placebo groups. (Read about a life-extending drug in the Year in Health...
...well as more detailed, computerized assessments of their mental function. Over the years, researchers saw overall cognitive decline in the study participants. The average rate of change in performance on the tests, which were initially given every six months and then yearly, was similar for both the ginkgo and placebo groups. "Quite frankly, one of the things that surprised us was that for an extract that has been around for this long, there ought to be a signal of some sort, or we ought to see some effect for it to have maintained its reputation for so long," says DeKosky...
...money and instructed to offer a portion to another participant. The recipient of the offer gets to accept or reject. If the offer is rejected, neither participant gets any money. Before allowing the women to propose their offer, researchers gave them either a dose of testosterone or a placebo...
...study authors hypothesized that participants taking testosterone would engage in riskier, more aggressive behavior - that is, offer their fellow participant a lesser amount of money. What happened instead was that the women who received testosterone made significantly more equitable offers than those who received a placebo, offering their partners an average of 3.9 money units out of 10, vs. 3.4 money units...