Ketter and his colleagues compared a healthy control group with bipolar patients, depression patients, and a control group of graduate students in writing and the arts.
The study had important limitations, including the small number of patients and the lack of a control group that was followed with standard therapy to compare benefits and side effects.
Although full results are not known, Celgene announced in its second-quarter earnings release Thursday that the study had been stopped ahead of schedule because the difference between patients getting Revlimid and those on a control group was already apparent.
During that time, 15% of patients taking Vytorin and 18% of patients in the control group had a heart attack, stroke, stent procedure, or death from cardiac causes.
Last week, two studies from Sweden found that one hour a week of hypnotherapy for 12 weeks eased symptoms of irritable-bowel syndrome in 40% of patients (compared with 12% in a control group) and that the positive effects can last as long as seven years.
But a subset of patients who did not have a genetic variant called APOE4, showed statistically significant improvements across four different tests for Alzheimer's symptoms, Wyeth and Elan said, when compared to a control group of patients who did not get the drug.
The gold standard for testing medical treatments is the randomized trial, in which patients are randomly assigned to a treatment or control group to spread patient differences evenly and avoid bias in results.
WSJ: Heart Bypass Surgery May Offer Lower Death Risk Than Angioplasty
In one of the first studies to address this issue, Netherlands epidemiologist Robert Laheij culled medical records of 365, 000 patients and found that people taking proton pump inhibitors had a 90% higher risk of getting pneumonia than a control group not taking the drugs.
Twenty had relapsing remitting MS, 15 had secondary progressive MS, and five had primary progressive MS. Researchers also recruited 15 healthy control patients free from ophthalmological or neurological disease as a comparison group.
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