The impact of lipid-based nutrient supplement provision to pregnant women on newborn size in rural Malawi: a randomized controlled trial.

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at Folic Acid and Micronutrients.

The researchers developed a small-quantity lipid-based nutrient supplement (SQ-LNS) to enrich the diets of pregnant women.

Who Took Part

The study group was 1391 women.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were infants, young adults and adults, women only.

The researchers enrolled 1391 women with uncomplicated pregnancies (<20 gestational weeks) in a randomized controlled trial in Malawi.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized study.

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

Primary outcomes were birth weight and newborn length.

Secondary outcomes included newborn weight, head and arm circumference, and pregnancy duration.

Analysis was by intention to treat.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Birth Weight, Dietary Supplements, Energy Intake, Folic Acid, Growth Disorders, Infant, Low Birth Weight and Iron, Dietary.

The authors tagged it with the keywords home-fortification, intrauterine growth restriction, lipid-based nutrient supplements, pregnant women and preterm birth.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Folic Acid and Micronutrients in 1391 women.

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

Results are reported in around 6 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2015 (The American journal of clinical nutrition), a journal based in United States.

More context: all human trials.