DO IT Trial: vitamin D Outcomes and Interventions in Toddlers - a TARGet Kids! randomized controlled trial.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in this randomized controlled trial publication.

By May, a blood sample will be drawn to determine vitamin D serum levels.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 750 children were involved.

PubMed indexes the participants as infants and young children.

Over 4 successive winters the researchers will recruit 750 healthy children 1-5 years of age.

Parents will obtain a nasal swab from their child with each URTI, report the number of asthma exacerbations and complete symptom checklists.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

This study is a pragmatic randomized controlled trial.

Participating physicians are part of a primary healthcare research network called TARGet Kids!.

Unscheduled physician visits for URTIs and asthma exacerbations will be recorded.

The primary analysis will be a comparison of URTI rate between study groups using a Poisson regression model.

Secondary analyses will compare vitamin D serum levels, asthma exacerbations and the frequency of specific viral agents between groups.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Asthma, Canada, Dietary Supplements, Disease Progression, Respiratory Tract Infections, Seasons and Vitamin D.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in 750 children.

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

Results are reported in around 2 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2014 (BMC pediatrics), a journal based in England.

More context: the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc compound page, all human trials.