Effects of progesterone and vitamin D on outcome of patients with acute traumatic spinal cord injury; a randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled study.

What Was Tested

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

The aim of the current study was to investigate the effects of progesterone and vitamin D on functional outcome of patients with acute traumatic SCI.

Who Took Part

The study group was 64 patients.

PubMed indexes the participants as teenagers, adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

Patients were visited 6 days, 3 and 6 months after injury and motor and sensory function was assessed according to American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) score.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized and placebo-controlled 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.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc group a baseline to be compared against.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Methylprednisolone, Motor Activity, Progesterone, Sensation, Spinal Cord Injuries and Vitamin D.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Functional recovery, Outcomes and Spinal cord injury.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and placebo-controlled study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in 64 patients.

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 2016 (The journal of spinal cord medicine), a journal based in England.

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