← Issue №13/ week of Sep 27, 2026/Hepatology

Meta-Analysis: The Placebo Response in Modern Treatments for Cholestatic Pruritus: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials.

From GI Signals issue №13: what this paper found, what it changes, and where it sits against the current standard of care, reviewed by Simon Mathews, MD.

Hepatology meta analysis · n=548 · Sep 24, 2026 · Aliment Pharm Ther · IF 6.7

Meta-Analysis: The Placebo Response in Modern Treatments for Cholestatic Pruritus: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials.

New evidencemeta-analysissystematic review
Clinical takeawayNo clinical action yet: this meta-analysis quantifies placebo effects in cholestatic pruritus trials, which informs trial design but does not directly impact patient management.
What it foundPlacebo groups in cholestatic pruritus trials showed a pooled standardized mean change of -0.49 (95% CI, -0.72 to -0.27) overall and -0.57 (95% CI, -0.81 to -0.33) for moderate-to-severe pruritus, with a 30.0% overall response rate.
ContextConfirms the substantial placebo effect in cholestatic pruritus trials, highlighting variability across outcome instruments and the need for careful endpoint selection in future studies.
No standard claimed for this paper

Every paper is compared to the standard governing its question. This one is not: either no standard in the corpus matches it, or the comparison did not hold up on review and was withdrawn rather than published unverified. Both are logged.

Silveira IB … Cançado GGL · Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics · IF 6.7 · PubMed ↗Permalink
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