GIVE someone who is sick a sugar pill that you have told him is a powerful drug, and it will often make him feel better. Even if you tell him what it really is, he may still feel better. The placebo effect, as this phenomenon is known—from the Latin for “I shall please”—is one of the strangest things in medical science. It is a boon to doctors and a bane of those running clinical trials, who must take account of it in their designs. But how it works is obscure.
Knowing that would open up a new field of medicine. If placebos could be exploited rationally, perhaps in conjunction with functional drugs, better treatments might be effected. Drug testing, too, would be simplified, as trial designers were able select those more and less susceptible to the effect as the needs of the trial dictated. That would save effort, time and money.
One thing that is known about the placebo effect is that it involves several brain systems, each under the control of a particular type of messenger molecule, called a neurotransmitter. These systems, like everything else in the body, are regulated by genes. This has led some researchers to ask whether different versions of the genes in question might modulate a person’s susceptibility to placebos.
A review of these researchers’ studies, published recently in Trends in Molecular Medicine by one...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1JDM8Uv
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