Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

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How It Can Be Known

And when a clinical trial has no placebo arm it's fair to ask: how do we know efficacy was due to medicine?

Simple. With Alzheimer's, the people in the trial were too cognitively deficient to understand or anticipate any matter related to a pill (perhaps disguised in their food).

Why not conduct a one-armed patient-blind trial? Hide the 50 mgs of drug in a daily glass of fruit juice, apple sauce, or other food item. Not a thing for the cognitively deficient patient to know or understand. Life goes on, as before, day to day --- except for the drug now surreptitiously in the patient. Not a chance for a placebo effect. Any consequent behavioral changes must be due, solely, to the drug itself. Nothing else has changed, including the innate mental abilities or perceptions of the Alzheimer's patient.

Might new, innovative FDA trials protocols include this?