Effects of effervescent ranitidine on gastric pH: comparison with almagate and placebo in fasting and postprandial conditions.

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at Ranitidine.

To compare the effect of effervescent ranitidine, almagate (magnesium carbonate-aluminium hydroxide) and placebo on gastric pH, in fasting and postprandial conditions.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as adults, both men and women.

Twelve healthy volunteers underwent a gastro-oesophageal pH monitoring on three different occasions after the administration of each of the following randomly allocated treatments: almagate, effervescent ranitidine and placebo.

Treatment effects were assessed in fasting and postprandial conditions.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, placebo-controlled and crossover study.

The participants were allocated by chance, so the Ranitidine group and the comparison group should start out alike.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Ranitidine group a baseline to be compared against.

In the crossover set-up each of the participants took both Ranitidine and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

Onset and duration of alkalinization, percentage of time with pH > 4 and median gastric pH after treatments were calculated in both periods.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Aluminum Hydroxide, Antacids, Anti-Ulcer Agents, Carbonates, Fasting, Gastric Acid and Hydrogen-Ion Concentration.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, placebo-controlled and crossover study of Ranitidine.

Results are reported in around 4 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2004 (Alimentary pharmacology & therapeutics), a journal based in England.

More context: all human trials.