Effects of acetyl-L-carnitine and methylcobalamin for diabetic peripheral neuropathy: A multicenter, randomized, double-blind, controlled trial

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of L-Carnitine and Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12), published as a randomized controlled trial.

Who Took Part

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

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind, multicenter and parallel-group study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got L-Carnitine and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

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

More than one site took part, so the participants came from several places.

The L-Carnitine group and the comparison group ran side by side rather than switching.

The neuropathy symptom score, neuropathy disability score and neurophysiological parameters were measured during follow up.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Acetylcarnitine, Diabetes Mellitus, Type 1, Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2, Diabetic Neuropathies, Neural Conduction and Vitamin B 12.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Acetyl-L-carnitine, Diabetic peripheral neuropathy and Methylcobalamin.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and multicenter study of L-Carnitine and Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12).

Results are reported in around 5 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2016 (Journal of diabetes investigation), a journal based in Japan.

More context: the L-Carnitine compound page and the Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12) compound page, all human trials.