Preventive Effect of L-Carnitine on Scar Formation During Acute Pyelonephritis: A Randomized Placebo-Controlled Trial

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at L-Carnitine.

Urinary tract infection and pyelonephritis are clinical problems that frequently occur in children.

Several factors are responsible for renal tissue injury, morbidity, and renal scarring after pyelonephritis.

Who Took Part

The study group was 65 children.

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

A randomized double-blind clinical trial was conducted on 65 children aged 6 months to 10 years.

Patients were randomized into 2 groups to receive 7-day treatment with only antibiotics without L-carnitine (control group; n = 32) and 7-day treatment with L-carnitine (case group; n = 33) during the acute phase of infection.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized and double-blind study.

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.

Neither the children nor the staff measuring them knew who was on L-Carnitine, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

Technetium-99m-labeled dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA) scintigraphy was performed for all children during the acute phase (in 2-7 days of hospitalization) and late phase.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Acute Disease, Anti-Bacterial Agents, Antioxidants, Carnitine, Cicatrix, Kidney and Oxidative Stress.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and double-blind study of L-Carnitine in 65 children.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 9 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2020 (American journal of therapeutics), a journal based in United States.

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