Cholesterol-lowering effects of a proprietary Chinese red-yeast-rice dietary supplement.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Fatty Acids, published as a randomized controlled trial.

The researchers evaluated the lipid-lowering effects of this red-yeast-rice dietary supplement in US adults separate from effects of diet alone.

Why It Was Studied

The researchers examined the cholesterol-lowering effects of a proprietary Chinese red-yeast-rice supplement in an American population consuming a diet similar to the American Heart Association Step I diet using a double-blind, placebo-controlled, prospectively randomized 12-wk controlled trial at a university research center.

Who Took Part

The study group was 46 men.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were adults, middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

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

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Fatty Acids and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Neither the men nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Fatty Acids, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

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

Main outcome measures were total cholesterol, total triacylglycerol, and HDL and LDL cholesterol measured at weeks 8, 9, 11, and 12.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Biological Products, Cholesterol, Cholesterol, HDL, Cholesterol, LDL, Dietary Supplements, Fatty Acids and Hypercholesterolemia.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Fatty Acids in 46 men.

Results are reported in around 4 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 1999 (The American journal of clinical nutrition), a journal based in United States.

More context: all human trials.