Editorial: Placebo Response in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry: To Mitigate or to Harness?

Antipsychotics and α-2 agonists are evidence-based medications for Tourette's Disorder (TD). Tic severity, functional impairment, and risk-benefit trade-offs guide treatment planning.1 However, much like other clinical disorders in child and adolescent psychiatry, treatment that definitively improves symptoms without also causing untoward side effects remains an unmet clinical need. This editorial reviews a metanalytic synthesis of the TD literature that focused on the magnitude of the placebo response in pharmacological trials of TD to understand how clinically meaningful efficacy results in the extent literature are, particularly in the context of some recent trial failures.