Oral reduced L-glutathione improves growth in pediatric cystic fibrosis patients

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Glutathione in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Consensus nutritional guidelines for patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) recommend aggressive treatment of growth failure.

No controlled studies using oral GSH in CF have, however, been reported.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 44 patients taking part.

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

The researchers performed a placebo-controlled, randomized, double-blind, repeated-measures clinical trial in 44 pediatric patients with CF ages 18 months to 10 years.

How the Study Was Run

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

Because people in this Glutathione 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 Glutathione.

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

Primary outcomes were change in weight percentile, body mass index (BMI) percentile, height percentile, and fecal calprotectin.

Secondary outcomes included liver function tests and measures of systemic inflammation.

Blood samples were obtained on the baseline and 6-month visits.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Body Height, Body Mass Index, Cystic Fibrosis, Glutathione, Leukocyte L1 Antigen Complex, Oligopeptides and Weight Gain.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Glutathione in 44 patients.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 4 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2015 (Journal of pediatric gastroenterology and nutrition), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Glutathione compound page, all human trials.