Jeff Aronson

was about 60%.

60% of the patients in relatively small trial had one or more adverse events.

And those adverse events were serious in 23%.

Most commonly, they involved abnormal liver function, diarrhea, rashes,

renal impairment and low blood pressure.

So it's not clear that this drug is necessarily harmless.

One has to look out very carefully for adverse reactions.

The importance of doing

proper double-blind randomized study in such a case asserts itself because if you don't do the double-blind randomized study then you won't know which adverse events were actually due to the drug and were actually adverse reactions so it's important not only to look for benefits but to look for harms and

and to use proper controls, double-blind, to show you the extent to which the adverse events you're seeing can actually be attributed to the medicine.

And we don't know anything about that just yet.

All of this stresses the importance of doing proper, double-blind, randomized, controlled trials.