CU-Boulder prof: Placebo effect beneficial to Parkinson's patients

The power of positive thinking appears to have tangible benefits for people with Parkinson's disease and could have broader implications, according to a new study co-authored by a University of Colorado associate professor.

Learning-related brain activity in Parkinson's patients improves as much in response to a placebo treatment as to real medication, according to the study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. It was co-authored by Tor Wager, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, and by researchers at Columbia University.

"I think there's so much hype around the fact that placebos work, that they do everything or they don't do anything at all," Wager said. "I think the truth sort of lies somewhere in between. It was surprising to me that the placebo effect and drug effects were very comparable."

Funded with "a couple of hundred thousand dollars" by the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, Wager said, the study shows how the placebo treatment patients being led to think they have received medication, although they have not works in people with Parkinson's disease by activating the dopamine-rich areas in the brain. Wager said the results underscore the power of expectations to effect changes in the brain.

"Many people know that dopamine is particularly important for Parkinson's disease, so we looked at the brain's response related to dopamine in regions of the brain, and we compared (results from) getting the sham medication to actually getting the real thing," Wager said. "And the interesting thing is that the improvements were just as large for the placebo as for the real medication."

Parkinson's patients are known to have trouble with what is known as reward learning, the brain's ability to connect actions with rewards, and to make motivated decisions in pursuit of positive outcomes.

For the study, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of 18 Parkinson's patients as they played a computer game that measures reward learning. Participants in the game discovered through trial and error which of two symbols was more likely to lead to a better outcome either a small financial reward or simply not losing any money.

The Parkinson's patients played the game three times: when they were not taking any medication; when they took real medication dissolved in orange juice; and when they took a placebo, which consisted of drinking orange juice that they thought contained their medication.

Researchers found that the dopamine-rich areas of the brain associated with reward learning , the striatum and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, became equally active when patients took either the real medication or the placebo treatment.

To Wager, the message from the study results are that psychological intervention non-medicinal support can be as important as the medicine that's ingested.

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CU-Boulder prof: Placebo effect beneficial to Parkinson's patients