Effect of Levocarnitine on the Therapeutic Efficacy of Conventional Therapy in Children with Dilated Cardiomyopathy: Results of a Randomized Trial in 29 Children

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of L-Carnitine, published as a randomized controlled trial.

The aim of this study was to explore the effect of oral levocarnitine supplementation in pediatric patients with DCM.

Why It Was Studied

The effect of levocarnitine supplementation has not been evaluated in children with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM).

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are infants, young children, children and teenagers, both men and women.

Twenty-nine children with DCM (17 male, 12 female, aged 1 month to 13 years) were divided into two groups according to a simple randomization: control group (n = 10) and experimental group (n = 19).

All children were given oral hydrochlorothiazide, enalapril, and spironolactone; additionally, patients with cardiac function of NYHA grade IV were given oral digoxin, and patients with intractable heart failure were given intravenous dopamine and dobutamine.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized.

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.

When cardiac function was restored to NYHA grade II-III, patients were given oral metoprolol.

Patients were followed up at 1, 3, 6 and 12 months.

Left ventricular ejection fraction (EF), short axis shortening (FS), and left atrium (LA) and left ventricle (LV) diameters were measured at different times during the follow-up.

What Was Measured

The effect of levocarnitine supplementation has not been evaluated in children with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM).

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Cardiomyopathy, Dilated and Carnitine.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of L-Carnitine.

Its findings take up roughly 4 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2018 (Paediatric drugs), a journal based in Switzerland.

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