Effects of L-carnitine supplementation on lipid profiles in patients with coronary artery disease

What Was Tested

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

To date, no clinical study has been performed to examine the effect of LC supplementation on the lipid status of coronary artery disease (CAD) patients.

Why It Was Studied

L-carnitine (LC) plays an important physiologic role in lipid metabolism.

Who Took Part

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

Forty-seven subjects were recruited and randomly assigned to the placebo (n = 24) and to the LC (n = 23) groups.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, single-blind and placebo-controlled.

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.

In this single-blind L-Carnitine study one party knew the assignments and the other did not.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with L-Carnitine could be set against what happens without it.

A time span of 12 weeks appears in the methods.

The intervention was administered for 12 weeks.

The levels of LC, lipid profiles, and antioxidant enzyme activity (superoxide dismutase, SOD) were measured.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Apolipoprotein A-I, Apolipoproteins B, Cardiac Catheterization, Carnitine, Cholesterol, HDL, Cholesterol, LDL and Coronary Artery Disease.

Author keywords: Antioxidant, L-carnitine supplement and Lipid profiles.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, single-blind and placebo-controlled study of L-Carnitine over 12 weeks.

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 (Lipids in health and disease), a journal based in England.

More context: the L-Carnitine compound page.