Sorbitol as a marker for drug-induced decreases of variable duration in liver blood flow in healthy volunteers.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Octreotide and Sorbitol, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as adults, men only.

In a double-blind, placebo controlled, randomised study, six healthy males received sorbitol for 170 min.

Sampling for sorbitol assay and echo-Doppler hepatic portal vein flow measurements were done regularly and treatments were compared using ANOVA.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and pilot.

Because people in this Octreotide study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Octreotide, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Octreotide could be set against what happens without it.

It is described as a pilot, a small early test of whether a larger Octreotide study would be practical.

At sorbitol steady state, which was at 45 min after the start of the infusion (t=0), somatostatin or octreotide was infused for 30 min.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Area Under Curve, Liver Circulation, Octreotide, Pilot Projects, Portal Vein, Somatostatin and Sorbitol.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Octreotide and Sorbitol.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 6 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2000 (European journal of pharmaceutical sciences : official journal of the European Federation for Pharmaceutical Sciences), a journal based in Netherlands.

More context: the related Octreotide library page, all human trials.