A double blind placebo controlled study to determine the effects of intermittent cyclical etidronate on bone mineral density in patients on long-term oral corticosteroid treatment.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Vitamin D and Calcium in this randomized controlled trial publication.

A double blind, placebo controlled study was undertaken to determine the effects of 104 weeks of intermittent cyclical etidronate therapy on bone mineral density (BMD) in patients undergoing long-term oral corticosteroid therapy.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

Dual energy x ray absorptiometry (DEXA) measurements of the lumbar spine and hip BMD and biochemical bone marker analyses were performed at baseline and every six months.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

As a double-blind Vitamin D study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Vitamin D group a baseline to be compared against.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Asthma, Bone Density, Calcium, Etidronic Acid, Glucocorticoids, Lumbar Vertebrae and Osteoporosis.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Vitamin D and Calcium.

Results are reported in around 8 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 1998 (Thorax), a journal based in England.

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