View clinical trials related to Placebo.
Filter by:The study is a randomized, placebo-controlled design with the opioid antagonist, oral naltrexone. Following random assignment, participants will take 50mg of naltrexone or placebo once a day for 7 days. On days 1 - 7, participants complete reports of their feelings of social connection and mood in order to assess more naturalistic feelings in response to opportunities for social connection outside of the laboratory setting. Additionally, at the end of each day, they complete a physical symptoms questionnaire. On the 7th day, participants will come to the SDSU MRI scanning facility to complete tasks designed to elicit feelings of social connection in the fMRI scanner. After the scan, feelings in response to the scanner tasks will be collected.
Sleep inertia (sometimes also referred to as sleep drunkenness) is a disabling state of increased sleepiness, impaired mood and reduced vigilance immediately upon awakening. Sleep inertia is highly prevalent in various neurological diseases, including neurodegenerative, affective and circadian sleep-wake rhythms disorders, as well as in frequent societal conditions such as chronic sleep restriction, jetlag and shiftwork. Reactive countermeasures against sleep inertia, i.e., strategies implemented upon wake-up, are not sufficiently effective, yet current recommendations are limited to proactive strategies, including long enough sleep at optimal times of day. These recommendations are not always easy and sometimes impossible to apply. To address this unmet medical need, the investigators developed an innovative, time-controlled, pulsatile-release formulation of 160 mg caffeine targeting an efficacious dose briefly before planned awakening.
Caffeine supplementation has been recognized such as an useful strategy for improving performance in intermittent sports, however caffeine ingestion in futsal has been barely studied. In this randomized placebo-controlled study, we investigated the effects of acute caffeine supplementation in improving neuromuscular performance and physical match activity in futsal players.
This project examines, in chronic pain, the mechanisms of immersive virtual reality compared to the mechanisms of placebo hypoalgesia. The potential of developing new non-pharmacological premises for low-risk interventions for pain management is high.
This project will aim to investigate the clinical efficacy and metabolic effects of a pre-exercise dose of caffeine with a low (10g) dose of carbohydrate (CAF+lowCHO) without modification of insulin degludec on exercise metabolism in people with T1D.
An increased interest of animal-assisted interventions (AAI) can be observed within clinical practice, even though it is still not entirely clear how the presence of an animal contributes to the outcome of a treatment. One theory maintains that the mere presence of an animal influences the therapeutic alliance between therapist and client. However, results from a recent study suggest that a relationship between patient and health-provider alone is not sufficient to influence treatment outcomes, but that a therapeutic rationale is needed and that verbal instructions and suggestions are highly important in shaping participants' treatment expectations. To investigate this theory, this study will combine AAI with a placebo intervention, as placebo interventions offer the basic form of intervention working through relationship and expectancy. The effects of the presence of a dog will be assessed with a standardized experimental heat pain paradigm (TSA-II) in a randomized controlled trial in healthy participants (N=128). After a baseline measurements of heat pain threshold and tolerance, participants will be randomly assigned to one of the following four conditions: a) placebo intervention , no dog present, b) placebo intervention, dog present, c) no placebo intervention, no dog present and d) no placebo intervention, dog present. The dog will be introduced after randomization. Expectancy will be induced by telling participants that the contact to an animal increases the oxytocin level, which has an non inflammatory effect. The placebo intervention will be a deceptive cream which is said to helps against pain. Afterwards, posttreatment measurements will be conducted and participants fill in questionnaires about their perceptions of the experimenter.
Incidental affective states, i.e., affective states can influence decision making and selective attention to threatening information. Acute stress is such an affective state and is a powerful contextual modulator of decision-making processes and selective attention to threat. In terms of physiological and neurohormonal changes, the stress response has been well characterized: Exposure to stress elicits an array of autonomic, endocrine, and behavioral responses. The physiological stress response is mediated by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the locus coeruleus noradrenergic (LC-NA) system with cortisol and norepinephrine (NE) as their end products. There is compelling evidence that the stress hormones cortisol and NE influence cognitive processes. However, only very few studies so far used pharmacological approaches to specify the role of stress neuromodulators on decision making and selective attention to threat and these studies are hardly comparable due to differences in the experimental design, e.g., the decision making task used. Furthermore, the neural underpinnings of stress effects on decision making and selective attention to threat are uninvestigated so far. The aim of the proposed project is to clarify the role of the major stress neuromodulators, NE and cortisol, in their contribution to different processes related to decision making under risk and selective attention to threat. To this end, combined precise pharmacological stimulation, behavioral modeling, and fMRI methods will be applied to systematically disentangle the effects of stress hormones on risk attitudes and loss aversion as well as their relation to neural correlates of processing subjective value and risk. Using pharmacological manipulation, the influence of noradrenergic and glucocorticoid activity on decision making under risk at the behavioral, computational, and neural level will be investigated. In addition, the influence of noradrenergic and glucocorticoid activity on selective attention to threat at the behavioural and neural level using a dot-probe paradigm with fearful and neutral faces will be examined. Participants are randomly assigned to one of four groups: (A) yohimbine, (B) hydrocortisone, (C) yohimbine and hydrocortisone, or (D) placebo.
This study aims to investigate the neurophysiological mechanisms of placebo perceived as caffeine during a motor task. Central and peripheral measures (i.e. electroencephalography and electromyography) will be assessed.
Patients suffering from borderline personality disorder (BPD) are considered frequent utilizers of psychiatric emergency rooms and of psychiatric hospitalizations. Nonetheless, recent studies challenge the effectiveness of psychiatric hospitalizations in reducing BPD symptoms, and some have even indicated potentially harmful effects such as increasing suicide risk post-discharge. These findings highlight the importance of effective outpatient treatments for BPD patients in public psychiatric hospital settings. In this study we aim to assess the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of two empirically-based treatments for BPD: dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and dynamic deconstructive psychotherapy (DDP).
Placebo effects held an ambivalent place in health care for at least two centuries. On the one hand, placebos are traditionally used as controls in clinical trials to correct for biases and the placebo response is viewed as an effect to be factored out in order to isolate and accurately measure the effects of the treatment. On the other hand, there is scientific evidence that placebo effects represent fascinating psychoneurobiological events involving the contribution of distinct central nervous as well as peripheral physiological mechanisms that influence pain perception and clinical pain symptoms and substantially modulate the response to pain therapeutics. Therefore, placebo effects have shifted from being a challenge for clinical trials to a resource to trigger the reduction of pain based on endogenous mechanisms that can be activated in the brain to promote hypolagesia, self-healing, and well-being. This is relevant in acute pain settings given that chronic opioid users die within approximately 2.5 years of being prescribed their first opioid medication to treat acute pain. The overall hypothesis is that observational learning influences neural pain modulation and cognition systems, including processes associated with mentalizing (the ability to cognitively understand mental states of others), empathy (the ability to share an emotional experience), and expectancy (the anticipation of a benefit). The objective is to determine the brain mechanisms of observationally-induced analgesia using brain mapping approaches that target changes in blood oxygenation and oscillatory activity in the brain, thus enabling investigators to draw inferences about the localization and extent of neurobiological activation underlying hypoalgesia driven by observation. Therefore, the investigators designed innovative experiments using pharmacological fMRI, EEG, and combined EEG-fMRI measurements.