Oral magnesium oxide prophylaxis of frequent migrainous headache in children: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Magnesium Oxide in the context of migraine, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are young children, children and teenagers, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and parallel-group.

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

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Magnesium Oxide, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

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

The Magnesium Oxide group and the comparison group ran side by side rather than switching.

Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group trial.

This study was conducted between June 1997 and January 2000 using 7 selected Northern California Kaiser Permanente sites.

The number of headache days (days with at least one headache) during each of eight 2-week intervals was chosen to be the primary outcome variable.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Magnesium Oxide, Migraine Disorders and Recurrence.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Magnesium Oxide in people with migraine.

Its findings take up roughly 6 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2003 (Headache), a journal based in United States.

More context: Migraine research.