The SU.VI.MAX Study: a randomized, placebo-controlled trial of the health effects of antioxidant vitamins and minerals.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Zinc and Antioxidants, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Who Took Part

The study group was 13,017 adults.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

A total of 13 017 French adults (7876 women aged 35-60 years and 5141 men aged 45-60 years) were included.

How the Study Was Run

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

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Zinc and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Blinding on both sides kept the adults and researchers unaware of who received Zinc.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Zinc could be set against what happens without it.

Median follow-up time was 7.5 years.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Antioxidants, Ascorbic Acid, Dietary Supplements, Myocardial Ischemia, Neoplasms, Selenium and Vitamin E.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Zinc and Antioxidants in 13,017 adults.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

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 2004 (Archives of internal medicine), a journal based in United States.

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