Lack of difference among terlipressin, somatostatin, and octreotide in the control of acute gastroesophageal variceal hemorrhage

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Octreotide and Somatostatin, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Vasoactive drugs are recommended to be started as soon as possible in suspected variceal bleeding, even before diagnostic endoscopy.

Patients with nonvariceal bleeding were excluded after endoscopy.

Who Took Part

The study group was 780 patients.

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

In total, 780 patients with variceal bleeding were enrolled: 261 in the terlipressin group; 259 in the somatostatin group; and 260 in the octreotide group.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized and multicenter.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Octreotide and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

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

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Acute Disease, Endoscopy, Gastrointestinal, Esophageal and Gastric Varices, Gastrointestinal Hemorrhage, Hemostasis, Lypressin and Octreotide.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and multicenter study of Octreotide and Somatostatin in 780 patients.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

Its findings take up roughly 1 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2014 (Hepatology (Baltimore, Md.)), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Octreotide compound page and the Somatostatin compound page, all human trials.