Nutritional iron deficiency is the most common cause of anemia in India. The nearest correlation of iron deficiency anemia (IDA) can be made with Pandu Roga in Ayurveda. As the IDA is a very common prevalent disease in the society and the side effects of oral allopathic iron preparations are very common, therefore to get a better alternative, an Ayurvedic herbomineral medicine, the Trikatrayadi Lauha, was subjected to a clinical trial in children suffering from IDA. Evaluation of safety and efficacy of the compound Trikatrayadi Lauha suspension in children with IDA. Randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled clinical study. The study was conducted on 123 children of IDA for a period of 10 weeks. Clinical features and hematological parameters were documented before, during and after treatment. Observations of the study were analyzed and findings were evaluated by using statistical methods (Student's t test) The present study shows that the trial drug Trikatrayadi Lauha suspension is effective to improve clinical features and hematological parameters significantly. The medicine is effective to increase the hemoglobin level 1.94 g/dL (8.52 -10.46 g/dL, P < 0.001) in 5 weeks and 3.33g/dL (8.52 -11.85g/dL, P < 0.001) in 10 weeks. No adverse effect of the trial drug was observed during the study. The results suggest that Trikatrayadi Lauha is significantly effective in the management of IDA in children.

Background: Ayurveda is widely practiced in South Asia in the treatment of osteoarthritis (OA). The aim of these secondary data analyses were to identify the most relevant variables for treatment response and group differences between Ayurvedic therapy compared to conventional therapy in knee OA patients. Methods: A total of 151 patients (Ayurveda n = 77, conventional care n = 74) were analyzed according to the intention-to-treat principle in a randomized controlled trial. Different statistical approaches including generalized linear models, a radial basis function (RBF) network, exhausted CHAID, classification and regression trees (CART), and C5.0 with adaptive boosting were applied. Results: The RBF network implicated that the therapy arm and the baseline values of the WOMAC Index subscales might be the most important variables for the significant between-group differences of the WOMAC Index from baseline to 12 weeks in favor of Ayurveda. The intake of nutritional supplements in the Ayurveda group did not seem to be a significant factor in changes in the WOMAC Index. Ayurveda patients with functional limitations > 60 points and pain > 25 points at baseline showed the greatest improvements in the WOMAC Index from baseline to 12 weeks (mean value 107.8 ± 27.4). A C5.0 model with nine predictors had a predictive accuracy of 89.4% for a change in the WOMAC Index after 12 weeks > 10. With adaptive boosting, the accuracy rose to 98%. Conclusions: These secondary analyses suggested that therapeutic effects cannot be explained by the therapies themselves alone, although they were the most important factors in the applied models.