Effect of zinc supplementation on infants with severe pneumonia.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc, published as a randomized controlled trial.

The researchers conducted this study to investigate serum zinc status amongst infants with severe pneumonia and the clinical impact that zinc supplementation has on those patients with low serum zinc levels.

Why It Was Studied

Pneumonia is a common respiratory infectious disease in infancy.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 96 infants taking part.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were infants, both men and women.

The study is approved by the Ethics Committees of Beijing Children's Hospital.

A total of 96 infants diagnosed with severe pneumonia and hospitalized in the pediatric intensive care unit between November 2011 and January 2012 were enrolled.

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 design was a non-blinded prospective randomized controlled trial.

Enrolled patients were divided into low serum zinc and normal serum zinc group.

The low serum zinc group was randomized into treatment and control groups.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Community-Acquired Infections, Deficiency Diseases, Dietary Supplements, Pneumonia and Zinc.

Author keywords: infant and supplementation.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in 96 infants.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 6 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2016 (World journal of pediatrics : WJP), a journal based in Switzerland.

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