NPR News August 26, 2011:
"It's not often that health experts say the evidence on something is so good that it would be wrong to keep studying it. But that's exactly what a group of researchers who've reviewed 43 trials on vitamin A supplementation for young children in developing countries contend.
Their review showed that vitamin A supplements reduced child mortality by 24 percent in low and middle income countries by preventing measles, diarrhea, and other illnesses in children. This translates into saving about 600,000 lives a year.
In fact, starting any new trials to test vitamin A on kids – using a standard placebo vs. treatment trial – would be unethical for the kids getting the placebo, they say in a paper published Thursday in the British Medical Journal, because the benefits of vitamin A are so clear.
"I've never really seen something that works so clearly," Evan Mayo-Wilson, a lecturer at the Centre for Evidence-Based Intervention at the University of Oxford and an author of the study, tells Shots. "From the 1970s through today, the picture hasn't changed. It's striking because the evidence of a really big reduction in mortality is very consistent."
Some 190 million children around the world are deficient in vitamin A; usually these are kids whose families can't afford eggs and dairy products. A deficiency in the nutrient makes kids more vulnerable to a range of illnesses including diarrhea, measles, and respiratory infections, which could also kill them. Though vitamin A supplements have now been available for more than a decade in developing countries where the child mortality rate has fallen, the researchers say there hasn't been any direct proof that the supplements were responsible for it."
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