Double-blind placebo and active (caffeine) controlled study to examine the effects of the herbal nutritional supplement beverage "Wake up" on vigilance and function after lunch.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Caffeine in this controlled clinical trial publication.

At 30 and 120 minutes post-drinking, they underwent a battery of tests to determine the effects of the beverage.

These included: a) a subjective assessment of alertness and performance based on a visual analog scale, and b) objective function tests: the immediate word recall test, the digit symbol substitution test (DSST), and hemodynamic measurements.

Why It Was Studied

Post-lunch dip is a well-known phenomenon that results in a substantial deterioration in function and productivity after lunch.

Who Took Part

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

How the Study Was Run

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

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received Caffeine.

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

Each person switched between Caffeine and the comparison at some point, usually with a gap in between.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Analysis of Variance, Beverages, Blood Pressure, Caffeine, Cognition, Dietary Supplements and Heart Rate.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a double-blind, placebo-controlled and crossover study of Caffeine.

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 2013 (The Israel Medical Association journal : IMAJ), a journal based in Israel.

More context: all human trials.