Effect of micronutrient supplement on health and nutritional status of schoolchildren: mental function.

What Was Tested

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

The researchers evaluated the effect of a micronutrient-fortified beverage on mental function in schoolchildren.

Who Took Part

The study group was 608 children.

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

This double-blind, placebo-controlled, matched-pair, cluster, randomized feeding trial assessed baseline before supplementation and after 14 mo in a cohort of 608 children aged 6 to 15 y who received a micronutrient-fortified beverage or placebo.

Children in two classes (clusters) in each of nine grades were assessed for intelligence, attention and concentration, memory, and school achievement.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

As a double-blind Micronutrients study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

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

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Attention, Cluster Analysis, Cognition, Food, Fortified, Health Status, India and Intelligence.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Micronutrients in 608 children.

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

Its findings take up roughly 5 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2006 (Nutrition (Burbank, Los Angeles County, Calif.)), a journal based in United States.

More context: all human trials.