Replies to post #446481 on Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

[bas2020]

One explanation was provided by Anavex... the placebo arm had more mild diseased patients.

Also, compare the RSBQ scores of blarcamesine to trofinetide. Quite a contrast.

[Joseph_K]

Unless you can find a way to explain why the placebo arm would be more encouraging than the treatment arm ...

I get your point, but I think it's inaccurate to say "the placebo arm [was] more encouraging than the treatment arm." The dosed arm did better than (was more encouraging than) the placebo arm. But I think you might have meant to say that the placebo arm got a better statistical lift from the placebo effect than did the dosed arm. I'm not sure that's correct, either. I'm no statistics expert, but I think that if they both got equal (but large) lift from the placebo effect, it would still have negatively impacted the statistical difference. (Consider, for example, reducing both RSBQ improvements by 8 points: then dosed would have improved by 4.93 compared to placebo's 0.32. I don't know enough statistics, but intuitively it seems highly likely that the comparative improvements would have been statistically significant in that scenario.)

Mind you, I'm not discountingyour point that the placebo effect impacted both arms, and one can't simply say the trial was a success but for this little placebo issue. Boi, BTW, has made an argument about why the placebo effect was so large.