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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2013 Jan 31.
Published in final edited form as: Anesthesiology. 2011 Jun;114(6):1435–1445. doi: 10.1097/ALN.0b013e318218a881

Figure 6.

Figure 6

Simulation study for an acute pain paradigm. Simulation studies enable the systematic exploration of inferences made in our study with respect to anticipated norketamine effect size. We performed simulations to estimate the effect of the large change in norketamine concentration and relatively modest change in ketamine concentration that we observed after rifampicin treatment on acute pain relief induced by 2-h 40 mg/h ketamine infusion (grey bar). We made a priori assumptions with respect to the norketamine contributions to ketamine effect: Simulations with 0, 10 and 25% norketamine contribution were made. The difference in effect observed in the simulated pain relief with and without rifampicin treatment will give an indication of the norketamine contribution to effect. The top diagram shows the difference in VAS between placebo and rifampicin data for the three norketamine contribution to effect: 0, 10 and 25%. VAS = visual analogue score.