Clinical trials

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women in the United Kingdom (UK). Most women are treated with a combination of surgery and radiotherapy. While these treatments are effective, they can cause ongoing breast pain for some, which can last months or even years. This long-term pain can have a major impact on quality of life, yet it is often overlooked and not well managed in routine care. One in three women may still experience breast pain three years after treatment. The pain can come from scarring, tissue damage, or nerve changes caused by surgery and radiotherapy. Treatments for this pain are limited. Many patients are advised the pain will subside on its own or are given basic painkillers, which sometimes have limited impact. ScarWork is a light-touch manual therapy, developed in the United States and aims to improve the way scars feel and look, reduce pain and tightness, and support healing. Although it has been available in the United Kingdom since 2014, there is very little research into whether ScarWork helps people who experience pain after breast cancer treatment. This small study is a first step to see whether ScarWork could be a useful treatment for people who have experience breast pain after surgery and/or radiotherapy. The researchers want to know: * Can this therapy be delivered in an NHS setting? * Do people find it helpful? * Is it worth doing a larger trial in the future? Participants will be randomly placed in one of two groups: one group will continue with usual care, and the other will receive up to five sessions of ScarWork in addition to usual care. Everyone in the study will be asked to complete short questionnaires about their pain and other symptoms, before and after treatment, and again one month later. Participants will also be invited to talk about their experiences in a short phone or online interview. This research will help show whether ScarWork might be a useful option for people dealing with breast pain after treatment. It will also help researchers design a larger trial in the future to test ScarWork more fully.

We are examining the effect of mindfulness meditation on attitudes towards tinnitus, as well as physical and psychological distress associated with the condition. The meditation is designed to promote neuroplasticity, fostering new neural connections to help you reinterpret tinnitus through a lens of safety and reduce the perception of threat. This approach integrates several techniques from various psychological therapies which have been promising in reducing tinnitusrelated distress. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to see whether a guided mindfulness meditation intervention is effective in improving the acceptance of tinnitus symptoms, as well as reducing tinnitus-related distress in people living with tinnitus.

The goal of this observational study is to improve the early detection of lung cancer in adults who have smoked less than 100 tobacco cigarettes ("never-smokers") in the United Kingdom. The main questions it aims to answer are: * To describe characteristics such as demographics, co-morbidities and environmental exposures * To describe participant pathways including presentation mode and symptoms to understand if earlier diagnosis would be possible * To describe participant outcomes such as cancer stage, treatment and mortality * To quantitatively or qualitatively measure modifiable and non-modifiable factors that may be associated with LCINS including environmental measures, blood tests and genomic data. Participants will currently have no change to their usual care.

Breath and sweat samples will be collected from people who have been admitted to hospital after a potential seizure and analysed by the team. The researchers then hope to identify a pattern of small molecules that can distinguish seizures from other events, and perhaps determine the severity of the seizure.

Knowledge about abnormal organ development is important to understand pathology and to develop novel treatment approaches for individuals with congenital and acquired disease. Most of our current understanding is based on examination of tissues from the embryo and early fetus, collected from women undergoing termination of pregnancy in the first trimester (third) of pregnancy. There is very little known about normal and abnormal organ development from a developmental perspective during the crucial last two-thirds of pregnancy when much remodelling of fetal tissues occurs. We aim to collect tissue from a variety of developing fetal organs in the last two-thirds of pregnancy from women who decide to undergo a termination of pregnancy and who wish to undergo a clinical fetal postmortem (PM) examination.

PD Frontline (part of RAPSODI GD) is an online study observational study with the goal of bringing People with Parkinson's to the frontline of research by getting them trial ready. To do this, participants are offered genetic sequencing for the GBA and LRRK2 gene with an at-home saliva collection kit.