Chocolate treatment deters patients
Thursday August 12th, 2010
Doctors may have found a healthy chocolate - that is so unpleasant patients will not eat it.
Medical
chocolate experts in Australia say their efforts to get patients to treat
blood pressure with the confectionery proved fruitless.
Researchers set out to test dark chocolate after establishing it could reduce blood pressure.
Chocolate that is 70 per cent cocoa is dark - and bitter. Researchers tried to get patients to take 50g, or half a bar of chocolate, daily.
They say this proved "significantly less acceptable" than placebo pills or a tomato extract.
In fact just 73 per cent of patients persisted with the treatment.
Researcher Karin Ried has reported her problems in a letter to the British Medical Journal.
BMJ 2010;341:c4176
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