Assessment of a combined strategy of seasonal malaria chemoprevention and supplementation with vitamin A, zinc and Plumpy'Doz™ to prevent malaria and malnutrition in children under 5 years old in Burkina Faso: a randomized open-label trial (SMC-NUT).

What Was Tested

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

Malaria and malnutrition represent major public health concerns worldwide especially in Sub-Sahara Africa.

Registered on 23 January 2020 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04238845.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are infants, young children and children.

Children (6-59 months) under SMC coverage receiving vitamin A supplementation will be randomly assigned to one of the three study arms (a) SMC + vitamin A alone, (b) SMC + vitamin A + zinc, or (c) SMC + vitamin A + Plumpy'Doz™ using 1:1:1 allocation ratio.

Anthropometric indicators will be recorded at each visit and blood samples will be collected for microscopy slides, haemoglobin measurement, and spotted onto filter paper for further PCR analyses.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized 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.

The primary outcome measure is the incidence of malaria in each arm.

Secondary outcome measures will include mid-upper arm circumference and weight gain from baseline measurements, coverage and compliance to SMC, occurrence of adverse events (AEs), and prevalence of molecular markers of antimalarial resistance comprising Pfcrt, Pfmdr1, Pfdhfr, and Pfdhps.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Antimalarials, Burkina Faso, Chemoprevention, Child Nutrition Disorders, Dietary Supplements, Malaria and Malnutrition.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Plumpy’Doz™, Randomized controlled trial, Seasonal chemoprevention, Vitamin A and Zinc.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

Results are reported in around 2 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2021 (Trials), a journal based in England.

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