Article Text

Download PDFPDF
Zinc or vitamin A reduced diarrhoea in young, poor Bangladeshi children

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.


 
 QUESTION: In young, poor children in Bangladesh, does supplementation with zinc or vitamin A, or both, reduce diarrhoea and acute lower respiratory infection (LRI)?

Design

Randomised (allocation concealed*), blinded (clinicians, patients, outcome assessors, and statisticians),* placebo controlled trial with 6 months of follow up.

Setting

Urban slums in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Patients

800 children who were 12 to 35 months of age were enrolled. Exclusion criteria were receipt of a vitamin A capsule in the previous 4 months or severe malnourishment. 665 children (83%) (mean age 24 mo, 53% boys) completed the trial.

Intervention

Children were allocated to zinc syrup (20 mg of elemental zinc), 5 ml/day (n=170); vitamin A, 200 000 IU (n=159); zinc plus vitamin A (n=175); or placebo (n=161). Zinc or placebo syrup was given for 14 days, and on day 14 patients received a vitamin …

View Full Text

Footnotes

  • * See glossary.

  • Source of funding: Thrasher Research Fund.

  • For correspondence: Dr M M Rahman, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA. mujib_99{at}yahoo.com.