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Pharmacy & Pharmacology vocabulary · Clinical Trials and Drug Development

Double-blind

Meaning in pharmacy & pharmacology, with examples

adjectiveCommon term

In pharmacy & pharmacology, double-blind means: Describes a trial in which neither the participants nor the researchers know who is receiving the real treatment and who is receiving a placebo or comparator.

In Turkish: çift kör

How it is used

Blinding, also called masking, reduces bias. A single-blind trial hides the treatment only from participants; an open-label trial hides it from no one. Hospital pharmacists often help by preparing identical-looking trial medicines and keeping the randomisation codes.

Example sentences

  1. It was a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial involving 2,000 patients.

  2. Because the study was double-blind, even the doctors didn't know which tablets were real.

Common collocations

  • double-blind trial
  • double-blind study
  • single-blind
  • open-label
  • break the blind
  • placeboA dummy treatment that looks like the real medicine but contains no active ingredient, used in clinical trials for comparison with the drug being tested.
  • randomized controlled trialA study in which participants are put into groups by chance, one receiving the treatment being tested and another a placebo or standard treatment, so results can be fairly compared.
  • clinical trialA research study in people that tests whether a new medicine or treatment is safe and works, usually by comparing it with a placebo or an existing treatment.
  • endpointThe main outcome a clinical trial measures to decide whether a treatment works, such as survival, the number of heart attacks or a change in blood pressure.

More terms: Clinical Trials and Drug Development

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