Effect of Vitamin D3 Supplementation on Severe Asthma Exacerbations in Children With Asthma and Low Vitamin D Levels: The VDKA Randomized Clinical Trial.

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

Enrollment started in February 2016, with a goal of 400 participants; the trial was terminated early (March 2019) due to futility, and follow-up ended in September 2019.

Who Took Part

The study group was 400 participants.

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

Participants were recruited from 7 US centers.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

Because people in this Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc group a baseline to be compared against.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Adrenal Cortex Hormones, Asthma, Cholecalciferol, Dietary Supplements, Symptom Flare Up, Treatment Failure and Vitamin D.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in 400 participants.

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

Its findings take up roughly 9 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 (JAMA), a journal based in United States.

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