Symptomatic response to blocked and unblocked pentagastrin stimulation in functional dyspepsia. Comparison of responders and non-responders to omeprazole identified in a single-subject trial model

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Pentagastrin.

The role of acid in functional dyspepsia is controversial and drug treatment trials indicate that only a subset of patients has acid-related symptoms.

A novel single-subject trial design, the Random Starting Day trial (RSD trial), was developed to identify acid-related symptoms.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are middle-aged adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

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

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

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

Epigastric pain was assessed every 15 for 90 min after stimulation using a 5-graded Likert scale and a VAS scale.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Area Under Curve, Dyspepsia, Gastric Acidity Determination, Hydrogen-Ion Concentration, Omeprazole, Pain Measurement and Pentagastrin.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 4 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2008 (Digestive diseases (Basel, Switzerland)), a journal based in Switzerland.

More context: the Pentagastrin compound page, all human trials.