Clinical trial: short-term effects of combination of satavaptan, a selective vasopressin V2 receptor antagonist, and diuretics on ascites in patients with cirrhosis without hyponatraemia--a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Vasopressin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

To investigate the short-term effects of satavaptan, a selective vasopressin V2 receptor antagonist on ascites in cirrhosis without hyponatraemia.

Why It Was Studied

There is little information on the effects of vaptans in patients with cirrhosis.

Who Took Part

The study group was 148 patients.

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

How the Study Was Run

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

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

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

Some patients received a placebo instead of Vasopressin, giving a reference point.

Running at several centres spread the Vasopressin study over different clinics and patient groups.

Average MELD scores were: 13.4, 12.3, 13.8 and 13.1 respectively.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Antidiuretic Hormone Receptor Antagonists, Ascites, Diuretics, Drug Combinations, Furosemide, Liver Cirrhosis and Morpholines.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Vasopressin in 148 patients.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 3 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2010 (Alimentary pharmacology & therapeutics), a journal based in England.

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