Effects of ghrelin treatment on exercise capacity in underweight COPD patients: a substudy of a multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of ghrelin treatment

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Ghrelin.

The aim of this substudy of the ghrelin treatment, multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial was to investigate the effects of ghrelin administration on exercise capacity and the underlying mechanisms in underweight patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) using cardiopulmonary exercise testing.

Why It Was Studied

UMIN (University Hospital Medical Information Network in Japan) C000000061.

Who Took Part

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

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and multicenter study.

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

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

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

More than one site took part, so the participants came from several places.

The primary outcome was changes in peak oxygen uptake V•o2.

Secondary outcomes included changes in exertional cardio-respiratory functions: O2-pulse, physiologic dead space/tidal volume-ratio (VD/VT), ventilatory equivalent for oxygen V•E/V•o2, and ventilatory equivalent for carbon dioxide V•E/V•co2.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Administration, Intravenous, Exercise Test, Exercise Tolerance, Ghrelin, Outcome Assessment, Health Care, Pulmonary Disease, Chronic Obstructive and Respiratory Function Tests.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

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 2013 (BMC pulmonary medicine), a journal based in England.

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