Effects of an energy and micronutrient supplement on growth and development in undernourished children in Indonesia: methods.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied the intervention named in the title in this randomized controlled trial publication.

To describe the methodologies of a clinical trial on the effects of an energy and micronutrient supplement on the growth and development of undernourished children.

An ANOVA was the statistic most frequently used to test inter-group differences and structural equation modeling was used to test the internal validity of the conceptual model of the study.

Why It Was Studied

Social variables included assessment of health facilities, childcare, housing, income and parental education.

Nutrition and growth variables included dietary intake measured over a 24 hr period every 2 months; hemoglobin and three iron indicators measured at baseline, 6 and 12 months; anthropometry measured every 2 months and skeletal maturation measured every 6 months.

Who Took Part

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

This trial included two cohorts of children classified as nutritionally-at-risk who were randomly assigned to three treatments (condensed milk + micronutrients (E); skimmed milk + micronutrients (M); skimmed milk (S)).

A 12-month-old (N=53) and an 18-month-old (N=83) cohort were recruited from 24 day-care-centers (DCC).

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized study.

Because people in this study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Six tea plantations in Pangalengan, West Java were the site for this study.

Twenty children that received the S supplement were part of the 12- and 18 month-old cohort.

Criteria for case inclusion were absence of chronic disease; length-for-age < or = -1 standard deviation (s.d.) and weight-for-length between -1 and -2 s.d. of the median of the reference of the World Health Organization.

What Was Measured

Social variables included assessment of health facilities, childcare, housing, income and parental education.

Nutrition and growth variables included dietary intake measured over a 24 hr period every 2 months; hemoglobin and three iron indicators measured at baseline, 6 and 12 months; anthropometry measured every 2 months and skeletal maturation measured every 6 months.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Analysis of Variance, Anthropometry, Child Day Care Centers, Child Development, Child Nutritional Physiological Phenomena, Child Welfare and Cohort Studies.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study.

The publication is from 2000 (European journal of clinical nutrition), a journal based in England.

More context: all human trials.