My wife came out of this conference saying, everyone is just throwing everything at the wall and see what sticks with vagal nerve stimulation. Controls are minimal to none in most studies. Of course her perspective is from the regulatory side.
That was my conclusion when reading this study. There is basically no control at all. They say the placebo effect couldn't have affected the results when the patients were under general anaesthetic. That is certainly true, but waiting 4 hours to measure TNF could certainly have had an effect.
Given that vagus nerve stimulation has failed in a placebo controlled trial for depression, I think we should be cautious about this and wait for some proper science.
It irks me when people do shoddy science like this, which basically tells us nothing.
It's actually worse than nothing. It puts an idea out there that may or may not be true, but it has the potential to get picked up by the media and/or stuck in people's minds as factual.
A single paper claiming vaccines causing autism is a great example of this...
My wife came out of this conference saying, everyone is just throwing everything at the wall and see what sticks with vagal nerve stimulation. Controls are minimal to none in most studies. Of course her perspective is from the regulatory side.