Maternal gestational vitamin D supplementation and offspring bone health (MAVIDOS): a multicentre, double-blind, randomised placebo-controlled trial.

What Was Tested

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

The researchers aimed to assess whether neonates born to mothers supplemented with vitamin D during pregnancy have greater whole-body bone mineral content (BMC) at birth than those of mothers who had not received supplementation.

Why It Was Studied

Arthritis Research UK, Medical Research Council, Bupa Foundation, and National Institute for Health Research.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as adults, women only.

The Maternal Vitamin D Osteoporosis Study (MAVIDOS) was a multicentre, double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial that recruited pregnant women from three study sites in the UK (Southampton, Oxford, and Sheffield).

Participants and the research team were masked to treatment allocation.

How the Study Was Run

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

Because people in this Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc 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 Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

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

Running at several centres spread the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc study over different clinics and patient groups.

Safety outcomes were assessed in all randomly assigned participants.

This trial is registered with the International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial registry, ISRCTN 82927713, and the European Clinical Trials Database, EudraCT 2007-001716-23.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Bone Density, Bone Density Conservation Agents, Dietary Supplements, Prenatal Nutritional Physiological Phenomena, Seasons and Vitamin D.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

Results are reported in around 7 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2016 (The lancet. Diabetes & endocrinology), a journal based in England.

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