Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

[falconer66a]

No, it’s the stock message board effect.

-" very high rollover rate into the open-label study which was over 95% which is extremely high."----what is significance of this ??? Why do patients want to stay on the drug ???

Well, the vast majority of people taking blarcamesine who are allowed to choose whether or not to continue with it after the trial they are in elect to continue is 95%. Obviously, that’s a rather impressive majority. How can that be accounted for?

First, understand “the placebo effect.” In the simplest, people taking what they think is a “good drug” presume that it will necessarily work. It’s being administered by real medical people, in a real medical environment, for a real medical purpose, to prevent or treat a real disease that they have. With all of this in play, patients taking what is, in fact, a colored starch pill (of no medical function whatsoever) will joyfully report that “it works.” Mind over matter.

Very clearly (to many, anyway), with this 95% preference to continue to take what is already known by medical experts as a useless, non-functioning drug (blarcamesine), a new variant of the placebo effect is now at play. Let me describe (and name) it.

The people in the clinical trial, now in the 21st-century, have access to all the world’s knowledge, right on their cell phones or computers. All of the people (well, at least 95%) in the trial got on the Internet and looked up “blarcamesine.” Lo and behold, they found a lot of “info” on an Anavex Life Sciences Corp stock investment message board, where they found a bunch of people telling all of the good benefits of the drug they were taking. Lots of articulate people telling lots of detailed benefits of the drug. Hence, at the end of the trial, 95% elected to continue with the drug, even though the trial came to an end.

Of course, they are all wrong. The evidence of blarcamesine’s safety and efficacy is woefully incomplete. At least three on-going clinical trials first need to be completed, then analyzed, then pondered by the FDA, awaiting that agency’s approval of the drug sometime in the distant future. Until the FDA approves the drug, it is categorically and unconditionally unsafe and ineffective. Period.

So, in this case we have a new placebo effect variant: the stock message board effect.

Henceforth this will have to be taken into account during drug clinical trials. Participants must be kept from consulting the Internet and web-based information sources (such as stock message boards) where clinical trial participants can mistakenly “learn” bad and wrong things about the drugs they are being tested with. As in this case, they could continue to take a useless drug long after the trial ends, in the “open label extension,” OLE. For drugs such as blarcamesine, that’s just so dangerous; allowing patients to be mentally deceived.

So, there. We’ve nailed it. So very clearly the 95% electing to continue with blarcamesine, after the clinical trial has formally ended, have done so because of the “stock message board effect,” not at all because they actually benefitted, had improved health. That can’t be. The drug isn’t yet approved by the FDA.