Plasma fibrinogen in ulcerative colitis: the effect of disease activity and nicotine therapy in a randomised controlled trial.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) in this randomized controlled trial publication.

To examine the effect of topical nicotine on plasma fibrinogen and any relationship between fibrinogen and ulcerative colitis disease activity.

Why It Was Studied

Fibrinogen is an acute phase protein and may reflect disease activity in ulcerative colitis.

Who Took Part

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

Plasma fibrinogen was measured at baseline and after 6 and 10 weeks; at each assessment sigmoidoscopy with a rectal biopsy was performed.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized and placebo-controlled.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) group a baseline to be compared against.

Forty-eight non-smokers with moderately active ulcerative colitis.

Changes in fibrinogen did not correlate with changes in disease severity.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Colitis, Ulcerative, Enema, Fibrinogen, Nicotine, Nicotinic Agonists, Sensitivity and Specificity and Sigmoidoscopy.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and placebo-controlled study of Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide).

Results are reported in around 1 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2005 (Digestive and liver disease : official journal of the Italian Society of Gastroenterology and the Italian Association for the Study of the Liver), a journal based in Netherlands.

More context: the Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) compound page, all human trials.