ArticleScientific reports2016
Using instrumental variables to disentangle treatment and placebo effects in blinded and unblinded randomized clinical trials influenced by unmeasured confounders.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- The effectiveness of care coordination on medication adherence among high-need, high-cost commercially insured beneficiaries: A randomized controlled trial.Journal of managed care & specialty pharmacy · 2026Trial
- Care Coordination for High-Need, High-Cost Commercially Insured Patients: A Randomized Clinical Trial.JAMA network open · 2025Trial
- Causal Inference in Studies with Functional Unmasking: Psychedelics and Beyond.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Furosemide Exposure and Prevention of Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia in Premature Infants.The Journal of pediatrics · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Clinical trials traditionally employ blinding as a design mechanism to reduce the influence of placebo effects. In practice, however, it can be difficult or impossible to blind study participants and unblinded trials are common in medical research. Here we show how instrumental variables can be used to quantify and disentangle treatment and placebo effects in randomized clinical trials comparing control and active treatments in the presence of confounders. The key idea is to use randomization to separately manipulate treatment assignment and psychological encouragement conversations/interactions that increase the participants' desire for improved symptoms. The proposed approach is able to improve the estimation of treatment effects in blinded studies and, most importantly, opens the doors to account for placebo effects in unblinded trials.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.