Levocarnitine Improves Cardiac Function in Hemodialysis Patients With Left Ventricular Hypertrophy: A Randomized Controlled Trial

What Was Tested

Researchers studied L-Carnitine in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Levocarnitine deficiency in hemodialysis patients is common.

Who Took Part

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

Patients undergoing maintenance hemodialysis with carnitine deficiency (free carnitine plasma concentration < 40μmol/L) enrolled in 3 hemodialysis centers.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, double-blind, open-label, multicenter and parallel-group.

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

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on L-Carnitine, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

Nothing was hidden in this open-label L-Carnitine study: the participants and staff both knew the treatment.

Running at several centres spread the L-Carnitine study over different clinics and patient groups.

Multicenter, prospective, open-label, parallel, randomized, controlled trial.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Carnitine, Hypertrophy, Left Ventricular, Kidney Failure, Chronic and Renal Dialysis.

Author keywords: N-terminal pro–brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP), cardiac function, cardiac morphology, ejection fraction (EF), end-stage renal disease (ESRD) and hemodialysis (HD).

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and open-label study of L-Carnitine.

Its findings take up roughly 8 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2016 (American journal of kidney diseases : the official journal of the National Kidney Foundation), a journal based in United States.

More context: the L-Carnitine compound page, all human trials.