Enteral zinc supplementation for prevention of morbidity and mortality in preterm neonates.

What It Covers

Researchers studied Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in this meta-analysis publication.

The researchers used the GRADE approach to assess the certainty of evidence.

Why It Was Studied

Preterm and low birth weight infants are born with low stores in zinc, which is a vital trace element for growth, cell differentiation and immune function.

Preterm infants are at risk of zinc deficiency during the postnatal period of rapid growth.

Who the Included Studies Covered

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were infants.

How the Review Was Done

Their searches are up-to-date to 20 February 2020.

For the first search, the researchers used the standard search strategy of Cochrane Neonatal to search the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL 2017, Issue 8), MEDLINE via PubMed (1966 to 29 September 2017), Embase (1980 to 29 September 2017), and CINAHL (1982 to 29 September 2017).

The researchers also searched clinical trials databases, conference proceedings, and the reference lists of retrieved articles for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and quasi-RCTs.

The researchers ran an updated search from 1 January 2017 to 20 February 2020 in the following databases: CENTRAL via CRS Web, MEDLINE via Ovid, and CINAHL via EBSCOhost.

What Was Measured

The researchers excluded infants who underwent gastrointestinal (GI) surgery during their initial hospital stay, or had a GI malformation or another condition accompanied by abnormal losses of GI juices, which contain high levels of zinc (including, but not limited to, stomas, fistulas, and malabsorptive diarrhoea).

Two review authors separately screened abstracts, evaluated trial quality and extracted data.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Bacterial Infections, Bias, Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia, Cause of Death, Enteral Nutrition, Enterocolitis, Necrotizing and Infant Mortality.

What This Means in Plain Language

This is a meta-analysis of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 8 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2021 (The Cochrane database of systematic reviews), a journal based in England.

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