Maternal vitamin D supplementation during pregnancy and lactation to prevent acute respiratory infections in infancy in Dhaka, Bangladesh (MDARI trial): protocol for a prospective cohort study nested within a randomized controlled trial.

What Was Tested

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

Early infancy is a high-risk period for severe acute respiratory infection (ARI), particularly in low-income countries with resource-limited health systems.

Lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) is commonly preceded by upper respiratory infection (URTI), and often caused by respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza and other common community-acquired viral pathogens.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 1300 women taking part.

The age groups tagged for this paper are infants and adults, both men and women.

Supplementary home visits between surveillance visits are conducted when caregivers make phone notifications of new infant symptoms.

Mid-turbinate nasal swab samples are obtained from infants who meet standardized clinical ARI criteria.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized and placebo-controlled 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.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc could be set against what happens without it.

Specimens are tested by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for 8 viruses (influenza A/B, parainfluenza 1/2/3, RSV, adenovirus, and human metapneumovirus), and nasal carriage density of Streptococcus pneumoniae.

The primary outcome is the incidence rate of microbiologically-positive viral ARI, using incidence rate ratios to estimate between-group differences.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Acute Disease, Bangladesh, Breast Feeding, Clinical Protocols, Dietary Supplements, Infant, Newborn, Diseases and Lactation.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Acute respiratory infection, Influenza, Pneumonia, Pregnancy, Respiratory syncytial virus and Streptococcus pneumoniae.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and placebo-controlled study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in 1300 women.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

Its findings take up roughly 1 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2016 (BMC pregnancy and childbirth), a journal based in England.

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