They’re calling a drug that blocks nicotine absorption into the body a vaccine? An inhibitor that only has a 40% success rate.
sounds like Simpsons-style reasoning…
I could say that this rock keeps tigers away, do you see any tigers around? no? then it must be working…
typically for an experiment to be considered a success, don’t you need at least a 50% success rate, 40% doesn’t cut it, seems like bad science to me, although the notion is honorable, anything that helps smokers break their addiction is good…
still, only 40% success rate? [shakes head]
It actually is a vaccine since it induces the body to present an immune response to future exposure to the pathogen (nicotine).
Also, a brief review of some research papers indicates that it actually “inhibits” nicotine uptake much more than 40% of the time: it just seems that the 40% are the ones that actually quit smoking because of the vaccine. The other 60% probably have psychological reasons for not quitting or they still get enough physical satisfaction from it that they don’t see the need to quit (it seems like it lowers nicotine levels by about 60-70% in the brain from what I’ve read).
Certainly 50% isn’t necessary; all you need is a result better than the control. (Yes, “statistically significant” too, but 50% is arbitrary.) The article says 40% of those who got the vaccine quit, against 31% of the control group, and those with the most antibody did even better at 57%. The population is a bit small, I suppose, but we’ll see how the next round goes.
If the standard for approval of medications was that 50% of users benefited, we’d still be sacrificing small animals to cure hangovers. Most prescription medications don’t work on most people when the placebo effect is taken into consideration. The dirty little secret of modern medicine (one of many).
Well, as rjk said:
The article says 40% of those who got the vaccine quit, against 31% of the control group, and those with the most antibody did even better at 57%.
The placebo effect only goes so far. It helped some of the people quit, but a statistically significant amount of people did better with the vaccination than the placebo effect alone can explain.
And how is the placebo effect a dirty little secret? You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who hasn’t heard of it.
Sorry… hit submit too soon.
To elaborate on “And how is the placebo effect a dirty little secret? You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who hasn’t heard of it.”
Do you have any specific examples of widely used medications that aren’t significantly more effective than a placebo?
I mean, I don’t doubt that a few medications only perform just barely signficantly better than placebo, and that some medications work extremely well on some patients, but not very well or not at all on other patients. But if you have any examples of medications that really don’t work on anyone very well I’d like some examples. (Hope this doesn’t sound snippy, I really am interested).
I don’t see why a pharmaceutical company would waste time and money on developing a medication that doesn’t work on anyone. Or why doctors would bother prescribing it.