Talk:Palmitoylethanolamide

External links in article body

These links are not allowed, and I am removing them from the article body ("Clinical relevance" section). They are posted below, followed by the relevant phrase, if somebody would like to either turn them into refs or else add them to an External Links section:

https://www.dovepress.com/palmitoylethanolamide-a-neutraceutical-in-nerve-compression-syndromes--peer-reviewed-article-JPR "In a 2015 analysis of a double blind placebo controlled study of PEA in sciatic pain, the Numbers Needed to Treat was 1.5."

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/iji/2013/151028/ "In 2013 a review was published on the clinical efficacy and safety of PEA in flu,"

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/joph/2015/430596/ "These effects are also the explanation of PEA's retinoprotectant effects." --Quisqualis (talk) 06:46, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

LifeExtension magazine, March 2019

Wikipedia says: "PEA also seems to be one of the factors responsible for the decrease in pain sensitivity during and after sport, comparable to the endogenous opiates (endorphines)".

Could PEA be replaced by daily sports?

What could be the theoretical adverse effects?

LifeExtension magazine, March 2019 wrote about PEA:

March 2019: https://www.lifeextension.com/Magazine/2019/3/Turn-off-the-Pain-Signal/Page-01

SS 2017: https://www.lifeextension.com/Magazine/2017/SS/Break-the-Cycle-of-Chronic-Pain/Page-01

https://www.lifeextension.com/Search#q=palmitoylethanolamide&sort=relevancy&f:hierarchicalcategory=[Magazines]

Most of the clinical studies they refer to are all small, with small amount of participants or short duration.

LifeExtension magazine promotes dietary supplements (lots of tablets, instead of for example just doing daily sports), so it is a bit biased source of information.

I found almost nothing about PEA at Consumerlab.com and examine.com websites:

https://www.consumerlab.com/search/palmitoylethanolamide-review/

--ee1518 (talk) 12:30, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

What's your point? Are you suggesting we incorporate that website's material into the article, or not? So far, it seems clean of LE citations.--Quisqualis (talk) 15:30, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Please cease with WP:VER and WP:OR violations

These Wikipedia guidelines call for reportable information to be drawn from the review and other secondary and tertiary literatures, and not from our own insights, or from the morass of primary sources that wander about biological, chemical, and physical realities before they settle, eventually, through the secondary literatures, on what might be considered "true" about the scientific subject.

In order to be accurate here, work from secondary sources, supporting them from the primary. Occasionally, absent good review content, we can sample the "minireview" content of the introduction and discussion sections of primary reports, until the authoritative reviews are written, but only if these primary reports are from good labs, in good journals. Even when purely focused on the secondary and tertiary literatures, we need to be aware of secondary source shortcomings—e.g., when most reviews are by the same person/team, when the reviews are in poor journals, when the reviews are overly positivistic as authors promotionally self-serve their own research area. After that—after summarizing the review literature—we stop talking. We absolutely do not don't fill in the gaps from our own perceptions, or inferences. That is WP:OR, and is forbidden here. We speak when the authorities speak, and if not from them, not at all.

Right now the article is headed toward mediocrity or irrelevance, because a pattern has been established of making arguments from this labile, inconstant primary report morass—worse, creating the expectation that others will selectively add review citation support after the fact, which makes for a real mess. (A mess because only a true, narrow subject matter expert can then sort which primary source reports have prevailed, versus gone by the wayside. And when there are some 60 of them, such winnowing essentially never happens.) So, after today, I will tag original remarks with or template messages (or remove them if they are speculative), and will begin to call attention to all statements only supported by primary sources. Cheers, a relative expert, and former logging WP editor. 12.205.207.2 (talk) 20:13, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Goodbye wikipedia

Peer reviewed scientific studies aren't enough and secondary sources are needed? That's a pretty stupid and rather arbitrary standard. Secondary sources? Screw you wikipedia. How about dismissing Wikipedia altogether for nt having enough "secondary sources"? Cuvtixo (talk) 19:56, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Hello, can somebody help and add this information to this page?

Due to my careless action of leaving a VPN on while going to make an edit, I'm unable to make any edits at the moment and add any more to this page for a few more months. Can someone include this information when they next make an edit?

A review with further information explaining the interest from the pharma industry in PEA for inflammation caused by SARS-CoV-2 infections - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ptr.6978 - Phytotherapics in COVID19: Why palmitoylethanolamide? (2020)

For tidying up the early studies section, these two papers have a lot of the missing citations necessary for covering the timeline for isolation, discovery, and further research into its pleiotropic mechanisms of action.

https://www.academia.edu/28829666/Palmitoylethanolamide_Research_Synergy_between_Academia_and_Industry_Based_on_Insights_and_Work_of_Nobel_Laureate_Rita_Levi_Montalcini?email_work_card=title - Palmitoylethanolamide: Research Synergy between Academia and Industry, Based on Insights and Work of Nobel Laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini (2005)

https://www.academia.edu/3089172/The_search_for_the_palmitoylethanolamide_receptor - The search for the palmitoylethanolamide receptor (2005)

Foshaw (talk) 19:17, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

2023 chronic pain review

Probably worth adding this: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/6/1350 sciencewatcher (talk) 04:35, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

Hmm, so this was published in a nutrition journal for some reason (the purported target, PPAR-α, is the same target as regulated drugs). Their group recently published a study making the same kind of claim, in that same journal. That kind of feels sketchy, but I don’t know what the standard ethics rules for that kind of thing are. At least it doesn’t appear that they included their own study in the review.

Looking through the review:

Of the 11 studies in the review, 4 were solidly negative, 1 was not statistically significant but borderline, and 7 were positive. The largest study had 220 patients, but looking into it, it was actually not a study on just Palmitoylethanolamide but rather two substances: Palmitoylethanolamide+Transpolydatin. Apparently 3/11 studies were like this, so it doesn’t seem like those should have been included in this review. This kind of feels disappointing tbh. I would hope someone would have done a couple large studies, so that people aren’t stuck trying to glue together a lot of small, inconsistent studies Pabnau (talk) 00:24, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

The proposed source is a predatory, untrustworthy journal (pay-to-publish and/or not receiving strict editorial review), a publication of MDPI. Pabnau is correct: a pain analysis in a 'nutrients' journal? It's almost comical, actually. A quality pain review would appear, after rigorous review, in a reputable clinical journal or medical practice guideline.

Think of the common user: we can't expect a typical user to wade through details and gain clear information from such a source. Zefr (talk) 03:23, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

The link you gave (the wikipedia article on MDPI) shows that it isn't predatory. Pay to publish isn't necessarily a problem by itself, as it's just a necessary part of open access. I get a hell of a lot of scam from scirp which is impossible to unsubscribe from, but haven't had any spam from mdpi. Wikipedia lists scirp as a predatory publisher, but not mdpi. sciencewatcher (talk) 16:02, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

"Publications in MDPI journals are considered questionable. Editors have raised concerns about the robustness of MDPI's peer review process and their lack of selectivity in what they publish." () Wikipedia articles should be based on WP:BESTSOURCES. JimRenge (talk) 16:40, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

The "predatory" nature concerning MDPI isn't only about authors being recruited or seeking to pay for publication, but there are numerous other concerns displayed under the "Challenges' section of the MDPI article.

A section of WP:MEDRS on predatory publications states the specific concern in this discussion about a review on pain mechanisms appearing in a 'nutrients' journal: its content being outside the journal's normal scope. This is a common characteristic of MDPI's publishing practices appearing (and reverted, if I find them) in many Wikipedia articles.

One wonders how many times that review was rejected from reputable clinical pain journals before the authors gave up and found a way to get it published by MDPI.

MDPI is the first-listed publisher on WP:CITEWATCH (note top disclaimer). A 'rule of thumb' for MDPI citations: apply maximal skepticism about the source. If it hits any potential problems in the Citewatch disclaimer or among this list, reject it, and find a better review. Zefr (talk) 17:15, 15 June 2026 (UTC)