About this site

An independent scientific reference on lactoferrin. Nothing is sold and no link here earns a commission.

Six grades, shown first

Each claim carries one of six grades, rendered above the argument rather than beneath it. The set is defined centrally and the build fails if a page invents a seventh. The ordering is deliberate: a grade placed after the prose can be softened by the prose.

Laboratory only is descriptive. Much of the best lactoferrin work is cell work, legitimately so, and the failure this reference guards against is that work being narrated in clinical language. Not supported is held distinct from Insufficient, because a claim tested and failed is a finding, while a claim never tested is an absence. The preterm infant page records the clearest example of the former.

Evidence handling

Citations identify primary literature by PubMed or PMC identifier, verified through the NCBI interface rather than by loading the page. Design and sample size appear on the page, since a pooled analysis of four small trials and one blinded trial of two thousand infants support very different statements.

Concentrations always name their source material. Human colostrum, mature human milk and bovine milk differ by more than an order of magnitude, and a figure quoted without that context is the most frequent error in writing on this protein.

Boundaries

• No medical advice, and no instruction to take anything.
• No interpretation of an individual result. That belongs to the ordering clinician.
• No commerce of any kind.
• No credential claimed by anyone here.

Authorship and revision

Pages are edited under Imogen Reddaway, a pen name explained on that page. A grade that shifts because the evidence shifted is recorded with its date, and treated as the system functioning.

Queries about a grade, a citation or an error: [email protected]. Individual medical questions go unanswered.