Question

Researchers studied 208 infants whose brains were temporarily deprived of oxygen due to complications at birth. When researchers detected oxygen deprivation, they randomly assigned babies to either usual care or to a whole-body cooling group. The goal was to see whether reducing body temperature for three days after birth increased the rate of survival without brain damage. What is the purpose of including the "usual care" treatment in the experiment?

Answer 1

The main objective of including the usual care treatment in the experiment is to offer a baseline for determining the survival rates of infants who received cooling of the whole body. The experimenters incorporated the usual care treatment in the testing so that they could compare the outcomes of this treatment with the outcomes of the entire body cooling treatment.

With this assessment, the experimenters could evaluate that whether the cooling treatment exhibited more positive influences on the babies in comparison to the usual care.