Department of Psychology, The Faculty of Health Sciences, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, 9037, Tromsø, Norway.
Sci Rep. 2021 Sep 28;11(1):19205. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-98874-0.
Computations of placebo effects are essential in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) for separating the specific effects of treatments from unspecific effects associated with the therapeutic intervention. Thus, the identification of placebo responders is important for testing the efficacy of treatments and drugs. The present study uses data from an experimental study on placebo analgesia to suggest a statistical procedure to separate placebo responders from nonresponders and suggests cutoff values for when responses to placebo treatment are large enough to be separated from reported symptom changes in a no-treatment condition. Unsupervised cluster analysis was used to classify responders and nonresponders, and logistic regression implemented in machine learning was used to obtain cutoff values for placebo analgesic responses. The results showed that placebo responders can be statistically separated from nonresponders by cluster analysis and machine learning classification, and this procedure is potentially useful in other fields for the identification of responders to a treatment.
在随机对照试验(RCT)中,计算安慰剂效应对于将治疗的特异性效应与与治疗干预相关的非特异性效应分离至关重要。因此,识别安慰剂反应者对于测试治疗和药物的疗效很重要。本研究使用来自安慰剂镇痛的实验研究的数据,提出了一种统计程序,用于将安慰剂反应者与非反应者分开,并建议了当安慰剂治疗的反应足够大以至于可以与无治疗条件下报告的症状变化区分开来时的截断值。使用无监督聚类分析对反应者和非反应者进行分类,使用机器学习中的逻辑回归获得安慰剂镇痛反应的截断值。结果表明,通过聚类分析和机器学习分类可以从统计学上区分安慰剂反应者和非反应者,该程序在其他领域识别治疗反应者方面具有潜在的用途。