Indicators of improved emotion behavior in 6-14-year-old children following a 4-week placebo controlled prebiotic supplement intervention at home with a parent.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Copper (Supplement), published as a randomized controlled trial.

Retrospectively registered on https://clinicaltrials.gov/ [NCT06258135] on February 6, 2024.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as children and teenagers, both men and women.

Fifty-three healthy children, aged 6 to 14, participated in an 8-week trial.

Endline measures (T2) were conducted on the last day of supplement consumption, with a final follow-up testing session (T3) on day 56.

How the Study Was Run

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

The participants were allocated by chance, so the Copper (Supplement) group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Copper (Supplement), so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

Some participants received a placebo instead of Copper (Supplement), giving a reference point.

Primary outcomes were trait anxiety using a questionnaire and emotional behavior in a dot-probe task on responses to positive and negative images.

Secondary outcomes encompassed depression levels, cognitive function tests, and dietary intake recorded in a 4-day food diary.

Additionally, the researchers explored whether parents' emotional behavior had an impact on children's responses.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Prebiotics, Dietary Supplements, Anxiety, Emotions, Parents, Cognition and Depression.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Adolescence, Childhood, Children and Young people, GOS and Supplement intervention trial.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 5 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2025 (Nutrition journal), a journal based in England.

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