Effects of an energy and micronutrient supplement on skeletal maturation in undernourished children in Indonesia.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Micronutrients, published as a randomized controlled trial.

This paper reports the effects of an energy and micronutrient supplement on skeletal maturation of nutritionally at risk infants and toddlers in Pangalengan, Indonesia.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as infants, both men and women.

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

Twenty children that received S belonged to the 12- and 18-month-old cohorts.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized study.

The participants were allocated by chance, so the Micronutrients group and the comparison group should start out alike.

The sites were six tea plantations in Pangalengan, West Java.

Inclusion criteria were: no 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.

Skeletal maturation was measured by X-ray of the left hand and wrist.

The number of ossified centers and two different measures of skeletal age (Skel-1 and Skel-2) were the outcome variables measured.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Age Determination by Skeleton, Age Factors, Bone Development, Bone and Bones, Child Development, Cohort Studies and Dietary Supplements.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Micronutrients.

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 2000 (European journal of clinical nutrition), a journal based in England.

More context: all human trials.