Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme gene polymorphism on pregnancy outcome, enzyme activity, and zinc concentration.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Zinc in this randomized controlled trial publication.

To evaluate the effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) genotypes on pregnancy outcome, the incidence of pregnancy-induced hypertension, and changes in blood pressure (BP) during pregnancy; and the relationship between plasma ACE activities and plasma and erythrocyte zinc concentrations in each genotype.

The subjects (n = 191) were selected from 580 indigent African-American pregnant women who enrolled toward the end of a trial to evaluate the effect of zinc supplementation on pregnancy outcome.

Who Took Part

The study group was 93 subjects.

The age groups tagged for this paper are teenagers and adults, women only.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled.

Because people in this Zinc study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Neither the subjects nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Zinc, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

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

This calculation indicated that the sample size in each ACE genotype should be more than 28.

Angiotensin-converting enzyme genotypes were identified using polymerase chain reaction.

Blood pressure, plasma ACE activities, and plasma and erythrocyte zinc concentrations were measured at each prenatal clinical visit.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Black People, Blood Pressure, Genotype, Hypertension, Peptidyl-Dipeptidase A, Polymorphism, Genetic and Poverty.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Zinc in 93 subjects.

Its findings take up roughly 5 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 1996 (Obstetrics and gynecology), a journal based in United States.

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