Efficacy of L-carnitine supplementation on frailty status and its biomarkers, nutritional status, and physical and cognitive function among prefrail older adults: a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at L-Carnitine.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 50 subjects were involved.

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

This study is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial conducted among 50 prefrail subjects randomized into two groups (26 in L-carnitine group and 24 in placebo group).

Outcome measures include frailty status using Fried criteria and Frailty Index accumulation of deficit, selected frailty biomarkers (interleukin-6, tumor necrosis factor-alpha, and insulin-like growth factor-1), physical function, cognitive function, nutritional status and biochemical profile.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

Blinding on both sides kept the subjects and researchers unaware of who received L-Carnitine.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the L-Carnitine group a baseline to be compared against.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Biomarkers, Carnitine, Cognition, Dietary Supplements, Frailty, Hand Strength and Health Status.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Frailty Index accumulation of deficit, Fried criteria, L-carnitine supplementation, frailty biomarkers, physical function and prefrail elderly.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of L-Carnitine in 50 subjects.

Results are reported in around 3 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2016 (Clinical interventions in aging), a journal based in New Zealand.

More context: the L-Carnitine compound page, all human trials.