RespireRx Pharmaceuticals Inc (RSPI)

[enemem]

I agree. There is some wiggle-room with analgesia.More important is a robust arousal response, as a surrogate for RD.

I still think it's nuts that this trial's outcome depends on ampakines' effect on a behavior other than the one that's supposedly being tested.

It's possible also that (as neuro pointed out), the higher dose was given to establish a new highest dosage.

I think that it is quite possible (given the extremely potent opioid being used, and hence the difficulty of getting functionally matching dosages for every subject) that cor will fail to reach statistical significance, not because of ampakine's lack of efficacy, but because of the variability of the control (opiates-only) group.

What I mean is that it is possible that for all ampakine-exposed subjects, there will be a robust arousal response, but in the control group, while there will be a number of subjects who do show a blunted/absent arousal response, there will be others who don't loose the arousal response, muddying the analysis. This would be the kind of glass-half-full outcome whose significance can be shaped by spin, both positive and negative.

The nice thing is that the n of the control group is 3X the size of each ampakine condition, hence the likelihood of the main effect being lost due to control group variability is mitigated.