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PLACEBO
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
Irregular inflected form: placeboes
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
(Roman Catholic Church) vespers of the office for the dead
Classified under:
Nouns denoting acts or actions
Hypernyms ("placebo" is a kind of...):
vesper (a late afternoon or evening worship service)
Domain category:
Church of Rome; Roman Catholic; Roman Catholic Church; Roman Church; Western Church (the Christian Church based in the Vatican and presided over by a pope and an episcopal hierarchy)
Sense 2
Meaning:
An innocuous or inert medication; given as a pacifier or to the control group in experiments on the efficacy of a drug
Classified under:
Nouns denoting man-made objects
Hypernyms ("placebo" is a kind of...):
medicament; medication; medicinal drug; medicine ((medicine) something that treats or prevents or alleviates the symptoms of disease)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "placebo"):
active placebo (a placebo used in experimental tests of a drug that has noticeable side effects)
Context examples:
Of those participants who received peanut OIT, 83% passed the peanut challenge without an allergic reaction, while only 4% on placebo OIT did so.
(Few people with peanut allergy tolerate peanut after stopping oral immunotherapy, National Institutes of Health)
EXAMPLE(S): Double-blinded would indicate that both the investigator and the study subject would not know whether the intervention was a placebo or an active therapeutic intervention.
(Interventional Study Protocol Version Blinding Schema Code, NCI Thesaurus/BRIDG)
If categoryCode = Intervention, subcategoryCode may = Drug (including placebo), Device (including sham), Biological/Vaccine, Procedure/Surgery, Radiation, Behavioral (e.g., Psychotherapy, Lifestyle Counseling), Genetic (including gene transfer, stem cell and recombinant DNA), Dietary Supplement.
(Defined Activity Subcategory Code, NCI Thesaurus/BRIDG)
Hydrocortisone used as a placebo in comparative studies.
(Hydrocortisone/Placebo, NCI Thesaurus)
EXAMPLE(S): placebo, active, historical, uncontrolled, dose comparison
(Interventional Study Protocol Version Control Type Code, NCI Thesaurus/BRIDG)
In the omega-3 group, mean EPA levels quadrupled versus no change in the placebo group.
(Omega-3s from fish oil supplements no better than placebo for dry eye, National Institutes of Health)
A second group of 92 malnourished children, also under standard treatment but placed on placebos instead of vitamin D3 supplements, showed far less improvement than the first group
(Vitamin D3 boost helps treat child malnutrition, SciDev.Net)
In a joint-trial held by University College London, in England, and the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, 76 healthy volunteers were given either the drug or a placebo dummy pill.
(Antibiotics Could Prevent, Cure PTSD, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)
A clinical research protocol designed to investigate the efficacy of the biomedical or behavioral intervention in large groups of human subjects (from several hundred to several thousand), to confirm efficacy, to monitor adverse reactions to the new medication or treatment regimen with respect to long-term use and by comparing the intervention to other standard or experimental interventions as well as to a placebo.
(phase III trial, NCI Thesaurus)
In the current study, researchers led by Jack A. Yanovski, M.D., Ph.D., of NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) randomly assigned 21 study participants to received colchicine twice a day for 3 months, while 19 participants received a placebo.
(Gout treatment may help prevent obesity-related type 2 diabetes, National Institutes of Health)
