Short course adjuvant terlipressin in acute variceal bleeding: a randomized double blind dummy controlled trial

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Terlipressin, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Terlipressin is recommended for 3-5 days as adjuvant to endoscopic variceal band ligation (EVBL) in esophageal variceal bleeding (EVB).

The researchers assessed whether terlipressin can be administered for a shorter period of time to patients with EVB.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

All eligible EVB patients received 24h of open label terlipressin at presentation.

After successful EVBL, patients were randomized to receive active or dummy terlipressin for the next 48 h.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind and open-label study.

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

As a double-blind Terlipressin study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

Being open-label, the Terlipressin study did not mask who received what.

The researchers excluded patients with failure to achieve initial hemostasis, bleeding gastric varices, known hepatoma, and/or portal vein thrombosis, advanced cirrhosis (Child-Pugh score ≥12), and patients on a ventilator.

The primary outcome was failure to control EVB.

The secondary outcomes were 30-day mortality; re-bleeding and composite outcome of failure to control EVB.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Chemotherapy, Adjuvant, Combined Modality Therapy, Endoscopy, Digestive System, Esophageal and Gastric Varices, Hemorrhage, Ligation and Lypressin.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and open-label study of Terlipressin.

Results are reported in around 7 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2012 (Journal of hepatology), a journal based in Netherlands.

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