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Anthony R. Temple, MD; Joseph G. Pigeon, PhD
McNeil Consumers Products Company Fort Washington, Pa

JAMA. 1985;253(6):779-780.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

The article by Laska and co-workers¹ evaluating the effect on analgesia of caffeine added to aspirin, acetaminophen, and salicylamide suggests that caffeine has some adjunctive analgesic benefit. However, the authors failed to elaborate carefully on several methodological flaws that might negate their conclusions and on the relatively insignificant clinical benefit derived from the caffeine effect they describe.

Among the methodological flaws that make any interpretation of these data difficult are (1) the pooling of 26 or 30 studies that requires rather heroic assumptions as to linearity, parallelism, and homogeneity of variance and slopes and, given the conditions described, makes it impossible to test the validity of the assumptions made²; (2) the erroneous assumption that a linear relationship exists over the entire dosage range of 217 to 2,000 mg, even though there is a recognized lack of analgesia at the low end of the dosages used . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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