Nicotinamide riboside supplementation alters body composition and skeletal muscle acetylcarnitine concentrations in healthy obese humans

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of NAD+, published as a randomized controlled trial.

The researchers aimed to investigate the effects of 6 wk NR supplementation on insulin sensitivity, mitochondrial function, and other metabolic health parameters in overweight and obese volunteers.

Why It Was Studied

Nicotinamide riboside (NR) is an NAD+ precursor that boosts cellular NAD+ concentrations.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

A randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, crossover intervention study was conducted in 13 healthy overweight or obese men and women.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on NAD+, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the NAD+ group a baseline to be compared against.

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

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Acetylcarnitine, Body Composition, Dietary Supplements, Muscle, Skeletal, NAD, Niacinamide and Obesity.

Author keywords: human, insulin sensitivity, metabolic health, mitochondrial function and nicotinamide riboside.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of NAD+.

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 2020 (The American journal of clinical nutrition), a journal based in United States.

More context: the NAD+ compound page, all human trials.