There is insufficient data to justify the wide-spread prescription of phloroglucinol for alleviating abdominal pain.

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To assess the efficacy of acetylleucine to improve or stop an attack of vertigo and dizziness (vertigo/dizziness). Methods : Systematic review by 2 independent reviewers. Consultation of the Medline, Cochrane and ClinicalTrials.gov databases until September 2018. Key words: Acetylleucine, Tanganil ® , Acetyl-DLleucine, Acetyl-leucine were used. Trial selection: Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) comparing Acetylleucine against placebo. Results : Up till 2018, no RCTs have been published on the efficacy of acetylleucine in vertigo/dizziness Conclusion : There is no solid evidence of the efficacy of acetylleucine in vertigo/dizziness. Given its frequent prescription and the cost generated for the French social security system, high-quality randomised trials should be carried out to assess its efficacy.

Aim The placebo effect and the specific effect are often thought to add up (additive model). Whether additivity holds can dramatically influence the external validity of a trial. This assumption of additivity was tested by Kleijnen et al in 1994 but the data produced since then have not been synthetized. In this review, we aimed to systematically review the literature to determine whether additivity held. Methods We searched Medline and PsychInfo up to 10 January 2019. Studies using the balanced placebo design (BPD), testing two different strengths of placebos, were included. The presence of interaction was evaluated by comparing each group in the BPD with analysis of variance or covariance. Results Thirty studies were included and the overall risk of bias was high: four found evidence of additivity and 16 studies found evidence of interaction (seven had evidence of positive additivity). Conclusion Evidence of additivity between placebo and specific features of treatments was rare in included studies. We suggest interventions for placebo‐sensitive ailments should be tested in trials designed to take interactions seriously once an exploratory RCTs has proven their efficacy with sufficient internal validity.

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