Metabolic treatment with L-carnitine in acute anterior ST segment elevation myocardial infarction. A randomized controlled trial

What Was Tested

Researchers studied L-Carnitine in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Current study was aimed to assess the effect of L-carnitine administration on mortality and heart failure in patients with anterior AMI.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 4,000 patients were involved.

The age groups tagged for this paper are middle-aged adults, both men and women.

CEDIM 2 trial was a randomized, double-blind, multicenter, placebo-controlled trial planned to enroll 4,000 patients with acute anterior AMI.

The trial was interrupted after the enrolment of 2,330 patients because of the lower than expected enrolment rate.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and multicenter study.

Because people in this L-Carnitine 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 L-Carnitine.

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

More than one site took part, so the patients came from several places.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Carnitine, Electrocardiography, Myocardial Infarction, Myocardium, Survival Rate and Vitamin B Complex.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of L-Carnitine in 4,000 patients.

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

Its findings take up roughly 3 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 (Cardiology), a journal based in Switzerland.

More context: the L-Carnitine compound page, all human trials.