Vitamin B12, Folate, and Cognition in 6- to 9-Year-Olds: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12).

Vitamin B12 and folate are important for normal brain development.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 1000 children taking part.

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

The study is a follow-up of a factorial randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in 1000 North Indian children.

The researchers compared the scores of the main outcomes (the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fourth Edition [India], the Crichton Verbal Scale, and subtests of the NEPSY-II) between the study groups.

How the Study Was Run

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

Because people in this Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12) study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

As a double-blind Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12) study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12) group a baseline to be compared against.

The researchers also measured the associations between markers of the B vitamins (plasma cobalamin, folate, and total homocysteine concentrations) in early childhood and the cognitive outcomes.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Child Development, Cognition, Folic Acid, Homocysteine, India, Intelligence Tests and Language Development.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12) in 1000 children.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

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 2020 (Pediatrics), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12) compound page, all human trials.