A randomized trial comparing the pharmacology of magnesium sulfate when used to treat severe preeclampsia with serial intravenous boluses versus a continuous intravenous infusion.

What Was Tested

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

The simulated populations were used to determine area under the concentration-time curve (AUC) as a measure of total drug exposure and compared.

Why It Was Studied

The researchers hypothesize that an alternative regimen based on serial intravenous (IV) boluses can produce serum concentrations comparable to those produced by a continuous infusion.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 200 subjects were involved.

PubMed indexes the participants as adults, women only.

Women with severe preeclampsia were eligible and enrolled between January 2015 and February 2016.

Two hundred subjects were randomized by random numbers generated centrally in distinct blocks and stratified by study site.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized and open-label.

The subjects were allocated by chance, so the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Everyone knew when Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc was being given (open label), which is simpler to run but leaves more room for expectations to affect what is reported.

An open-label randomized trial was performed at two hospitals in Egypt.

Sparsely sampled magnesium serum concentrations were collected, nonlinear mixed effect modeling was conducted and Monte Carlo simulations were used to generate 200 simulated subjects in each treatment arm.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Anticonvulsants, Area Under Curve, Drug Monitoring, Magnesium Sulfate, Pre-Eclampsia, Pregnancy Outcome and Seizures.

Author keywords: Preeclampsia.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and open-label study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in 200 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 2018 (BMC pregnancy and childbirth), a journal based in England.

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