Reduced mortality risk in malnourished hospitalized older adult patients with COPD treated with a specialized oral nutritional supplement: Sub-group analysis of the NOURISH study.

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at Copper (Supplement).

Post-hoc, sub-group analysis from the NOURISH study cohort examined the effect of a high-protein oral nutritional supplement (ONS) containing HMB (HP-HMB) in malnourished, hospitalized older adults with COPD and to identify predictors of outcomes.

Why It Was Studied

Hospitalized, malnourished older adults with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) have an elevated risk of readmission and mortality.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and multicenter study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Copper (Supplement) and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received Copper (Supplement).

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Copper (Supplement) could be set against what happens without it.

Running at several centres spread the Copper (Supplement) study over different clinics and patient groups.

The NOURISH study (n = 652) was a multicenter, randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial.

Multivariate logistic regression was used to model predictors of the primary outcome and components.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Dietary Supplements, Hospitalization, Malnutrition, Nutritional Support, Prognosis, Pulmonary Disease, Chronic Obstructive and Valerates.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Beta-hydroxy-beta-methyl-butyrate, COPD, Oral nutritional supplements and Strength.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Copper (Supplement).

Results are reported in around 5 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2021 (Clinical nutrition (Edinburgh, Scotland)), a journal based in England.

More context: the Copper (Supplement) compound page, all human trials.