Jane
“I wholeheartedly support clinical research. I wouldn’t be here enjoying an active life if it wasn’t for health research.”
Jane Owen, retired physiotherapist and Patient Research Ambassador
We are here to help you find out about health and social care research that is taking place across the UK.
“I wholeheartedly support clinical research. I wouldn’t be here enjoying an active life if it wasn’t for health research.”
Jane Owen, retired physiotherapist and Patient Research Ambassador
“Unless we try things out we’d never get to know what would work”.
Stephen Burgess, rare cancer trial participant.
“Harry was well looked after, carefully monitored, and we felt supported by the staff every step of the way.”
Stephanie George and Lee Murdoch whose newborn son Harry took part in a study.
We’ve rebuilt the UK Clinical Trials Gateway to make it easier to use. We will continue to improve our new ‘Be Part of Research’ site but we need your help. Feedback now.
A four week online course which is delivered free of charge, explains how medical treatments are discovered, tested and evaluated to improve healthcare for all. The next course starts from the 7 October 2019 and can be completed at your convenience.
In this video, Professor Allan Gaw talks about how we build our understanding of how research feeds into our healthcare system. "Your role is crucial because every treatment that is given, every tablet that is prescribed and every test that is performed, has to first be discovered and then evaluated before it can be used".
Wendy Mitchell was diagnosed with young onset dementia at the age of 58. She is the author of Sunday Times Bestseller 'Somebody I Used to Know' and regularly blogs for the British Medical Journal. Wendy travels throughout the UK to talk about her involvement in research and encouraging others to do the same.
'It’s thought of as one of the safest painkillers to take during pregnancy, but a new study has warned of the dangers of taking paracetamol when pregnant' the Daily Mirror reports
Obesity prevention interventions which include both diet and physical activity may reduce the risk of obesity in pre-school children. Once at school, physical activity appears to be more effective for weight loss than diet alone. Resulting weight loss form any intervention, if any, has been very small with unclear benefits to the individual or population. This NIHR-supported Cochrane systematic review pooled the results of 153 global randomised-control trials (six from the UK) aiming to prevent childhood obesity. Most interventions targeted individual children at school and lasted less than a year. Other similar systematic reviews have found modest or no effect from childhood obesity prevention interventions targeting individual behaviour change. As a result, Public Health England advocates a “whole system approach”. This targets the problem of expecting individual children to change their life-long habits without also addressing the powerful obesity-promoting environmental factors all around them.
Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI), the less-invasive procedure, may be associated with a reduced risk of death and stroke for up to two years when compared with surgical aortic valve replacement for adults with severe narrowing of the aortic valve, irrespective of the level of surgical risk. TAVI is already an established procedure for those unsuitable for surgery or at high risk. This meta-analysis evaluated seven trials comparing 8,020 adults treated with one of these procedures who had any level of surgical risk, including those at low surgical risk. At present, NICE guidance recognises the use of TAVI as a safe and effective method but outlines open heart surgery as the first line of treatment for those at low surgical risk. This review backs the idea of TAVI now being used in a wider group of patients; however, there is still a balance of risks to be considered that requires a discussion of patient preference.