Placebo Effect Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

Trivia quiz questions with answers about the placebo affect.

Placebo Effect Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

What is a placebo?
A: A placebo is a substance or treatment of no intended therapeutic value.

Common placebos include what?
A: Inert tablets (like sugar pills), inert injections (like saline), sham surgery, and other procedures.

In drug testing and medical research, a placebo can be made to resemble an active medication or therapy so that it functions as a what?
A: A control.

This is to prevent the recipient(s) or others from knowing (with their consent) whether a treatment is what?
A: Active or inactive, as expectations about efficacy can influence results.

In a clinical trial any change in the placebo arm is known as what?
A: The placebo response and the difference between this and the result of no treatment is the placebo effect.

A placebo may be given to a person in a clinical context in order to deceive the recipient into thinking what?
A: That it is an active treatment.

The use of placebos as treatment in clinical medicine is ethically problematic as it introduces what into the doctor–patient relationship?
A: Deception and dishonesty.

Placebos have no impact on disease itself; they can only affect the person's what?
A: Perception of their own condition.

The word "placebo", Latin for "I will please", dates back to a what?
A: A Latin translation of the Bible by St Jerome.

How does the American Society of Pain Management Nursing define a placebo?
A: As "any sham medication or procedure designed to be void of any known therapeutic value".

In a clinical trial, a placebo response is what?
A: The measured response of subjects to a placebo.

What is the placebo effect?
A: The placebo effect is the difference between that response, and no treatment.

It is also part of the recorded response to any what?
A: Active medical intervention.

Any measurable placebo effect is termed what?
A: Either objective (e.g. lowered blood pressure) or subjective (e.g. a lowered perception of pain).

Placebos have no meaningful what?
A: Therapeutic worth.

They have no effect on disease, and can only affect some people's what?
A: Subjective judgment of their symptoms.

Sometimes they can make people feel better, and sometimes worse – in which case they are termed a what?
A: A nocebo.

Children seem to have greater response than whom to placebos?
A: Adults.

What did a review published in JAMA Psychiatry find?
A: They found that, in trials of antipsychotic medications, the change in response to receiving a placebo had increased significantly between 1960 and 2013.

The review's authors identified several factors that could be responsible for this change, including what?
A: Inflation of baseline scores and enrollment of fewer severely ill patients.

Another analysis published in Pain in 2015 found what?
A: That placebo responses had increased considerably in neuropathic pain clinical trials conducted in the United States from 1990 to 2013.

The researchers suggested that this may be because of what?
A: Because such trials have "increased in study size and length" during this time period.

A 2010 Cochrane review suggests that placebo effects are only apparent in what?
A: Subjective, continuous measures, and in the treatment of pain and related conditions.

Placebos are believed to be capable of altering a person's perception of what?
A: Pain. "A person might reinterpret a sharp pain as uncomfortable tingling."

One way in which the magnitude of placebo analgesia can be measured is by conducting what?
A: Open/hidden studies, in which some patients receive an analgesic and are informed that they will be receiving it (open), while others are administered the same drug without their knowledge (hidden).

Such studies have found what?
A: That analgesics are considerably more effective when the patient knows they are receiving them.

In 2008, a controversial meta-analysis led by psychologist Irving Kirsch, analyzing data from the FDA, concluded what?
A: That 82% of the response to antidepressants was accounted for by placebos.

However, there are serious doubts about what?
A: About the used methods and the interpretation of the results, especially the use of 0.5 as cut-off point for the effect-size.

A complete reanalysis and recalculation based on the same FDA data discovered what?
A: That the Kirsch study suffered from "important flaws in the calculations".

The authors concluded that although a large percentage of the placebo response was due to expectancy, this was not true for what?
A: The active drug.

Another meta-analysis found that 79% of depressed patients receiving placebo remained well (for 12 weeks after an initial 6–8 weeks of successful therapy) compared to what percentage of those receiving antidepressants?
A: 93%.

In the continuation phase however, patients on placebo did what?
A: They relapsed significantly more often than patients on antidepressants.

It was previously assumed that placebo response rates in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) are unusually high, "at least 30% to 50%", because of what?
A: The subjective reporting of symptoms and the fluctuating nature of the condition.

According to a meta-analysis and contrary to conventional wisdom, the pooled response rate in the placebo group was what?
A: 19.6%, even lower than in some other medical conditions.

A phenomenon opposite to the placebo effect has also been what?
A: Observed.

When an inactive substance or treatment is administered to a recipient who has an expectation of it having a negative impact, this intervention is known as a what?
A: A nocebo (Latin nocebo = "I shall harm").

A nocebo effect occurs when the recipient of an inert substance reports a negative effect or a worsening of symptoms, with the outcome resulting what?
A: Not from the substance itself, but from negative expectations about the treatment.

Another negative consequence is that placebos can what?
A: They can cause side-effects associated with real treatment.

Withdrawal symptoms can also occur when?
A: After placebo treatment.

This was found, for example, after the discontinuation of what?
A: The Women's Health Initiative study of hormone replacement therapy for menopause.

Women had been on placebo for an average of how long?
A: 5.7 years.

Moderate or severe withdrawal symptoms were reported by what percentage of those on placebo compared to 21.3% of those on hormone replacement?
A: 4.8%

Knowingly giving a person a placebo when there is an effective treatment available is what?
A: A bioethically complex issue.

While placebo-controlled trials might provide information about the effectiveness of a treatment, what does it deny some patients?
A: What could be the best available (if unproven) treatment.

Informed consent is usually required for a study to be considered what?
A: Ethical, including the disclosure that some test subjects will receive placebo treatments.

The ethics of placebo-controlled studies have been debated in the revision process of what?
A: The Declaration of Helsinki.

Of particular concern has been the difference between trials comparing inert placebos with experimental treatments, versus what?
A: Comparing the best available treatment with an experimental treatment.

Some suggest that existing medical treatments should be used instead of placebos, to avoid what?
A: Having some patients not receive medicine during the trial.

There are concerns that legitimate doctors and pharmacists could open themselves up to charges of what by using a placebo?
A: Fraud or malpractice.

About what percentage of physicians in both the Danish and Israeli studies used placebos as a diagnostic tool to determine if a patient's symptoms were real, or if the patient was malingering?
A: 25%.

Both the critics and defenders of the medical use of placebos agreed that this was what?
A: Unethical.