Ashwagandha Extract Safe Over 24 Weeks in 1,200-Adult Trial

The correct answer is 1,200. The randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial enrolled that many apparently healthy adults between eighteen and seventy years of age, each of whom had already received a first, second or booster dose of the COVISHIELD vaccine, across seven study sites in India. The options of six hundred, nine hundred and fifteen hundred are wrong because none matches the enrolment reported for this study. A related figure is worth keeping separate: of those enrolled, 1,032 participants, which works out to eighty-six per cent, actually completed the full course, having taken the extract or a matching placebo for twenty-four weeks and been followed up to the twenty-eighth week. The trial was registered with the Clinical Trials Registry-India, and it was designed as a multicentre, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled study, which is the form of evidence regarded as the most reliable for questions of safety and tolerability in a healthy population.

The correct answer is 500 mg a day, a quantity stated to be equivalent to four grams of raw root powder. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either this standardised aqueous extract or a matching placebo, and the assignment was double-blind, meaning neither the participants nor the assessors knew which arm a person belonged to. The options of two hundred and fifty, seven hundred and fifty and one thousand milligrams are wrong because only the one dose was tested; the study was a safety and tolerability trial rather than a dose-ranging one. Over the twenty-four weeks, liver enzymes, bilirubin, creatinine and blood urea were tracked, and all stayed within the reported reference ranges. The study also looked at whether the extract interfered with the immune response after vaccination, and found virus-neutralising activity above eighty-five per cent in both arms, with no statistically significant difference between the group taking the extract and the group taking the placebo.

The correct answer is Frontiers in Medicine, where the paper appeared on 20 August 2026 under a title describing the prolonged prophylactic use and tolerability of Ashwagandha after COVISHIELD vaccination over twenty-four weeks. The Lancet is wrong because the study was not carried in it, although it is among the best known medical journals and therefore a tempting distractor. Nature Medicine is wrong for the same reason. The Indian Journal of Medical Research is wrong because, despite the study being run entirely at Indian sites by Indian institutions, the publication venue was the international journal named above. The work involved forty-five researchers drawn from nine institutions, including the Central Council for Research in Ayurvedic Sciences. The Ministry of Ayush drew attention to the paper as part of its wider effort to build a body of rigorous clinical evidence for standardised Ayurvedic preparations, a point made by the Ayush Secretary, by the National Professor of Ayush and by the Director General of the research council.