Effects of meal timing on changes in circulating epinephrine, norepinephrine, and acylated ghrelin concentrations: a pilot study

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Ghrelin.

Timing of food intake impacts on metabolic diseases.

Who Took Part

The study group was 20 volunteers.

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

Participants randomly received the test meal at 0800 or 2000 hours, and vice versa after 1 week.

Blood samples were collected before and up to 180-min post-meal, every 30 min, with participants supine, motionless, but awake.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, crossover and pilot study.

Because people in this Ghrelin study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

In the crossover set-up each of the volunteers took both Ghrelin and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

It is described as a pilot, a small early test of whether a larger Ghrelin study would be practical.

A time span of 1 week appears in the methods.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Acylation, Blood Glucose, Diet, Eating, Epinephrine, Ghrelin and Insulin.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, crossover and pilot study of Ghrelin in 20 volunteers over 1 week.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 6 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2017 (Nutrition & diabetes), a journal based in England.

More context: the Ghrelin compound page, all human trials.