A comparison of calcium, vitamin D, or both for nutritional rickets in Nigerian children.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc, published as a randomized controlled trial.

The researchers measured serum calcium and alkaline phosphatase and used a 10-point radiographic score to assess the response to treatment at 24 weeks.

Why It Was Studied

Nutritional rickets remains prevalent in many tropical countries despite the fact that such countries have ample sunlight.

Some postulate that a deficiency of dietary calcium, rather than vitamin D, is often responsible for rickets after infancy.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 123 children taking part.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were young children, both men and women.

The researchers compared the calcium intake of the children at enrollment with that of control children without rickets who were matched for sex, age, and weight.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized and double-blind study.

The children were allocated by chance, so the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Blinding on both sides kept the children and researchers unaware of who received Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Alkaline Phosphatase, Calcium, Calcium, Dietary, Nigeria, Rickets and Vitamin D.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Africa, Africa South Of The Sahara, Age Factors, Biology, Child and Comparative Studies.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and double-blind study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in 123 children.

Its findings take up roughly 4 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 1999 (The New England journal of medicine), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc compound page, all human trials.