Vitamin E supplementation restores glutathione and malondialdehyde to normal concentrations in erythrocytes of type 1 diabetic children

What Was Tested

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

This study examined the relationship between cellular glutathione and vitamin E concentrations and the effect of vitamin E (alpha-tocopherol) supplementation on glutathione and lipid peroxidation product concentrations in the erythrocytes of type 1 diabetic patients.

Data were analyzed statistically using a paired Students t test to compare 12 diabetic patients taking vitamin E with 12 diabetic patients receiving placebo supplementation and to compare diabetic patients with healthy nondiabetic subjects.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as children.

The researchers obtained written informed consent to participate in this study from diabetic patients (n = 29) and their age-matched nondiabetic siblings (n = 21) according to the guidelines of the Institutional Review Board on Human Experimentation.

Fasting blood samples were collected from each diabetic patient before the start of and after the 3 months of vitamin E or placebo supplementation.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

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

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received Glutathione.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Glutathione group a baseline to be compared against.

Glutathione, malondialdehyde (which is a product of lipid peroxidation), and alpha-tocopherol were determined using high-performance liquid chromatography A total of 5 diabetic patients were excluded after randomization from the data analyses.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Diabetes Mellitus, Type 1, Dietary Supplements, Erythrocytes, Glutathione, Lipid Peroxidation, Malondialdehyde and Regression Analysis.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Glutathione.

Results are reported in around 5 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2000 (Diabetes care), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Glutathione compound page, all human trials.