Improved gait in persons with knee related mobility limitations by a rosehip food supplement: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Plant Preparations, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were adults, middle-aged adults, older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

Randomized, participant and outcome assessor blinded trial.

At baseline and the 12 weeks follow-up, 3-dimensional gait analyses were performed from which the peak resultant knee moment was selected as primary outcome.

How the Study Was Run

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

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Plant Preparations and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

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

Some participants received a placebo instead of Plant Preparations, giving a reference point.

Secondary outcomes included sagittal and frontal plane knee joint moments, knee joint kinematics, peaks in the vertical ground reaction forces, and self-selected walking speeds.

Analyses were based on ANCOVA with the 'Intention-To-Treat' (ITT) population, defined as all randomized participants using last observation carried forward imputation for missing data.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Biomechanical Phenomena, Dietary Supplements, Gait, Knee Joint, Mobility Limitation, Phytotherapy and Plant Preparations.

Author keywords: Knee pain and Randomized trial.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Plant Preparations.

Results are reported in around 4 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2015 (Gait & posture), a journal based in England.

More context: all human trials.