A pilot study of the effect of inhaled buffered reduced glutathione on the clinical status of patients with cystic fibrosis

What Was Tested

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

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 10 patients were involved.

The age groups tagged for this paper are children, teenagers and adults, men only.

Nineteen subjects, age 6 to 19 years, with CF status documented by positive sweat chloride test results (> 60 mEq/L) were recruited for the trial.

After matching on age and sex, 10 patients were randomly assigned to the treatment group and 9 patients to the placebo group.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

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

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

It is described as a pilot, a small early test of whether a larger Glutathione study would be practical.

A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot study was conducted over an 8-week period.

INTERVENTIONS AND ANALYSIS: Treatment was buffered GSH, and placebo was sodium chloride with a hint of quinine.

General linear mixed models were used to analyze the data.

The final sample size was nine subjects in the treatment group and seven subjects in the placebo group.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Administration, Inhalation, Buffers, Cystic Fibrosis, Epithelium, Glutathione, Glutathione Disulfide and Pilot Projects.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Glutathione in 10 patients.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

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 2005 (Chest), a journal based in United States.

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