Acetyl-L-Carnitine Ameliorates Metabolic and Endocrine Alterations in Women with PCOS: A Double-Blind Randomized Clinical Trial

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at L-Carnitine in the context of pcos.

This study was designed to compare the endocrine and metabolic parameters as well as subjective and objective measures of stress in women with PCOS before and after treatment with acetyl-L-carnitine (ALC) and metformin plus pioglitazone.

Why It Was Studied

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a common endocrine-metabolic disorder and the main cause of infertility in women of reproductive age.

Affected women suffer from insulin resistance and present with an intense stress response.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 147 women taking part.

PubMed tags the participants as women only.

The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS14) and Profile of Mood States (POMS) were employed as subjective measures of stress.

The endocrine and metabolic functions of women with PCOS were assessed by measuring insulin, leutinizing hormone (LH), follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), testosterone, and adiponectin levels in fasting blood samples.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized and placebo-controlled.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got L-Carnitine and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with L-Carnitine could be set against what happens without it.

Medications were discontinued when pregnancy was confirmed.

Insulin resistance was calculated by Homeostatic Model Assessment of Insulin Resistance (HOMA-IR).

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Acetylcarnitine, Hypoglycemic Agents, Insulin, Insulin Resistance, Metformin and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Acetyl-L-carnitine, Adiponectin, PCOS and Pioglitazone.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and placebo-controlled study of L-Carnitine in 147 women in people with pcos.

Results are reported in around 10 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2021 (Advances in therapy), a journal based in United States.

More context: the L-Carnitine compound page, PCOS research.