Original articleImpact of Selenium on Mood and Quality of Life: A Randomized, Controlled Trial
Section snippets
Participants and Recruitment
The UK PRECISE pilot study was a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trial involving volunteers from four general practices affiliated to the Medical Research Council General Practice Research Framework (GPRF). Practices were deliberately chosen from areas of England with differing demographic characteristics: Guisborough and Linthorpe (NorthEast), Bromsgrove (West Midlands) and Bungay (East Anglia). Research nurses recruited similar numbers of men and women from each of three age
Participants
Five hundred one participants were recruited between June 2000 and July 2001 (Figure 1). Participant flow through the study shows that data from 448 participants were included in the final analysis (Figure 1): their baseline characteristics are shown in Table 1.
Compliance with Treatment
Four hundred fifty three of the 467 participants (97%) who completed six months were compliant according to pill count. Nonprotocol use of over-the-counter selenium (“drop-ins”) was assessed by inspection of the histogram of plasma
Discussion
We set out to investigate whether we could confirm that selenium enhanced mood in a large, randomized, double-blind, multi-center, placebo-controlled trial. Our study is by far the largest to date to investigate the effect of selenium on mood in healthy individuals: 448 versus 91 participants in total in the other studies. In agreement with Hawkes and Hornbostel (1996) but in contrast to Benton and Cook (1991) and Finley and Penland (1998), we found no evidence that additional selenium enhanced
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