An oral supplement enriched with fish oil, soluble fiber, and antioxidants for corticosteroid sparing in ulcerative colitis: a randomized, controlled trial.

What Was Tested

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

Who Took Part

The study group was 121 patients.

PubMed indexes the participants as adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

A total of 121 patients with UC and a disease activity index (DAI) from 3-9 on a 12-point scale were block randomized for extent of disease and smoking status.

How the Study Was Run

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

Because people in this Antioxidants 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 patients and researchers unaware of who received Antioxidants.

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

Clinical and histologic responses were assessed at 3 and 6 months or at the final visit.

A change in average prednisone use between groups was tested by using a linear mixed-effects model.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Adrenal Cortex Hormones, Antioxidants, Biopsy, Needle, Colitis, Ulcerative, Dietary Fiber, Dietary Supplements and Fish Oils.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Antioxidants in 121 patients.

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 2005 (Clinical gastroenterology and hepatology : the official clinical practice journal of the American Gastroenterological Association), a journal based in United States.

More context: all human trials.