To introduce. Dr. Merlin Wilcox is an academic, clinical lecturer and a practising GP and he's based in Oxford and Southampton.
So having to share him for the time being.
And Mel is going to talk to us about trials and tribulations and explain his work that he's been doing there.
And I think you're happy for people to interact.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yes. What you make of it.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you for asking me. It's great to be here and nice to meet you.
So as Clare said, I want to make this interactive, so please just interrupt if you've got questions or thoughts or whatever.
And I'm going to be asking you some questions as well.
So as Clare mentioned, I'm a GP and an academic clinical lecturer and I've been one of my main interests is global health.
I've been involved in a variety of different research projects in Africa,
and I'm going to give you a flavour of some of those with a particular focus on illustrating different study designs,
because I understand that's what you're doing this week.
So before I get started, I'm going to show you a picture of a couple of children because I like children.
This is my daughter blowing out the candles on her fifth birthday cake.
And this is a patient called Abu, who I treated in Mali a few years ago.
And I want to start off by asking you a question which only four isn't allowed to answer because he knows the answer.
How many times more likely is a child to die before their fifth birthday in Mali, which is a country in West Africa?
In case you didn't know compared to the UK, it's a multiple choice question.
If you think the answer is three times, put up your hand. If you think the answer is ten times, put up your hand.
If you think the answer is 30 times, put up your hands.
Well, unfortunately, those of you who've just put up your hands are correct.
A child in Mali is 30 times more likely to die before their fifth birthday than a child in the UK.
So the under-five mortality rate is one in 200. In the UK and Mali it's one in six.
So I think a lot of us realise the world is an unequal and unfair place, but not many people realise quite how unequal and unfair it is.
You might be wondering why I'm starting off with this,
but this is my sort of premise for my passion in life, which is how do we reduce child mortality?
And these are my research questions, very broad global research questions, which I'm not going to be able to answer completely tonight.
But this is sort of the reason behind all of the studies which I'm going to be talking about.
Why are so many children dying in Africa? What can be done to reduce childhood mortality?
And how should we spend our money to save as many lives as possible?
I'm not going to really answer fully any of these questions tonight, but as I say,
this is just to give the context of the reason for the studies that I am showing.
So this is an outline of what I'm going to talk about. I'm going to start off with why bother with different study designs?
And then I'm going to give you examples of different observational study designs and experimental study designs
of studies illustrating these various designs which you may or may not have already been talking about.
And some of them are a bit innovative or wacky or different, probably from the standard ones.
So just to start off with the hierarchy of evidence, which I'm sure you've all seen before, looking at this, one might think, well,
the only thing that policy makers and decision makers ever look at is actually a systematic reviews of randomised controlled trials.
So why bother with any of the rest? Why not just do randomised controlled trials of everything?
Because that's the only thing that matters. Surely cohort studies and case control studies and case reports and all the rest of it or waste of time?
Well, part of what I'm going to try and show you this evening is that actually those studies are quite useful and they do have their place.
So bear with me on that. So let's start off then with the top of the pyramid of the evidence based medicines that we're talking about.
Since I'm talking about child mortality in Africa, there are lots of systematic reviews, and this is one from The Lancet published a few years ago,
which found that actually there's quite a lot of interventions which have very good evidence that they work.
And basically, if they were all implemented, 63% of childhood deaths could be prevented.
So maybe we should just leave it at that and start implementing what we already know.
This is the summary of the studies from the this systematic review showing that for the biggest causes of under-five death, there are,
for most of them, level one, which means sufficient evidence of interventions which are effective and could be rolled out to prevent.
Most of these causes of death. So there are those who say we should just implement what we already know.
But interestingly, this is a thing that was published a few years ago in The Lancet.
UNICEF attempted to do just that in several countries in Africa.
They tried to implement this accelerated child survival and development program,
which is basically trying to implement all of those evidence based interventions.
And they found that actually it didn't, unfortunately, seem to make much of a difference.
So the areas where they implemented it, yes, the mortality reduced,
but it wasn't significantly greater than the control areas in the in the same countries.
And why? Well, it's to do with implementation problems, etc.
So maybe randomised trials and systematic reviews aren't enough on their own.
Maybe we need some research into how to implement things and scale them up effectively because clearly it's not yet working properly,
otherwise all these kids would be dying. So my first question is why is so many children still dying in Mali?
Mali is one of the countries in West Africa with probably to the highest under-five mortality rates,
one of the countries with the highest and five mortality rates in the world.
So a good study designed for answering this question is a confidential inquiry, which is a sort of mixed methods approach.
It includes quantitative information on numbers of deaths and causes of death,
but it also has qualitative information on things that are avoidable factors, recommendations of what could be done to avoid these deaths.
So we asked village health workers, which are basically volunteers in villages,
to report all the deaths of children under five within the selected study areas over a period of two or three years.
And then we asked Fieldworkers to interview the families, visit the families, invite them to be interviewed.
Obviously, we asked for them for the informed consent and the fieldworkers conducted what's called a verbal autopsy interview,
which is a standard questionnaire. But there's also open ended questions in there asking about the story of what happened before the child died,
asking about their symptoms, but also where they went for treatment, what treatments they took, and so on.
And we also attempted to interview any health workers involved in looking after those children.
And all of this information was summarised and brought together to a panel of doctors, nurses.
We even it sometimes included village health workers, traditional healers.
And they discussed the case and tried to decide what was the most likely cause of death.
What were the avoidable factors, and what recommendations could be made to avoid similar deaths in the future?
And so these are some of the results. And this is just the one family.
We did this in Uganda as well, but I'm not going to show those results now.
And these are these are the top causes of death, according to our study.
So interestingly, malaria comes out as a clear winner.
46% of the deaths were attributed to malaria.
Interestingly, that's very different from the W.H.O. statistics.
That puts malaria in third place with only 14% of deaths.
So maybe our areas are different from the ones that W.H.O. sampled.
We don't really know how W.H.O. got those figures, but anyway, they were not applicable really for our study area.
Also interestingly, malnutrition came up as a quite an important direct cause of death,
which doesn't even appear in the W.H.O. list of causes of death.
So already this has given us some new and different information from the standard statistics.
And you might think and a commonly made assumption is that if you know the causes of death, then you can work out what to do about it.
Because if the top cause of death is malaria,
then we know from our systematic reviews that mosquito nets are an effective intervention for preventing deaths from malaria.
So probably we should roll out mosquito nets if we take that assumption to be true.
But is it true? So these are the avoidable factors from our Confidencial inquiry.
So this is the percentage of deaths in which the intervention could have prevented
the fatal illness and in which it wasn't already being used by the person who died.
And interestingly, mosquito nets are right at the bottom only 5% of deaths.
So that's bizarre. Why? Well, it turns out that the majority of kids who died of malaria,
their parents claimed at least that they had already been sleeping under a mosquito net.
Now, from this study, we don't have enough information to unpick that.
There could be a variety of different reasons why they weren't working.
Maybe they weren't sleeping under them every night. Maybe the parents were lying.
Maybe the mosquito nets had holes in them. Maybe mosquitoes changed their biting habits so they bite earlier than children.
Go to bed. You laugh. But it's true. There's evidence not from here, but from Indonesia.
I think in some places the selective pressure of mosquito nets, because they're so widely used, has actually selected mosquitoes that bite.
It's a different time of day because they are so good at killing mosquitoes that bite during the night.
It could be that mosquitoes have become resistant to insecticides.
There's also evidence that that's happening in various places. So we don't know why mosquito nets seem to not be working in this group.
But what we can say from this is that continuing to roll out mosquito nets in the way that it's being done now probably
actually isn't going to have as big an impact as one might predict just by looking at the cause of death statistics.
The other interesting thing is that nutrition, as in good nutrition and family planning,
come quite high up as things that could prevent quite a lot of deaths.
And you wouldn't really predict either of those.
Maybe nutrition, but you wouldn't predict that it was so important by looking at this list of causes of death.
So interviewing people about avoidable factors, which has a qualitative component to it.
This was all a lot of it was derived qualitatively by what the panels thought,
etc. and then we quantified it afterwards is quite a useful thing to do as well.
Now where did the children die?
This picture actually is taken from an article that was published in 2001 using statistics from the 1990s about where children died.
And the article was called The Heirs of the Hippopotamus. And it was making the point that if you work in a hospital in Africa,
you only see the ears of the hippopotamus because fewer than 5% of children at that time were coming to hospital.
There are no icebergs in Africa. So what were are comparable figures?
So in 2012, these are the statistics from our study.
It hasn't really changed very much. You can see a little bit more of the years, 12%.
But still, the majority of the children are dying at home or on the way to a health facility.
So really, if you're just focusing on hospitals, you're going to miss the majority of the problem.
Okay. So summarising the advantages and disadvantages of this study design method of a confidential inquiry, the advantage is all that.
It does give you very detailed information about the deaths. It enables you to prioritise the problems that need to be addressed.
And it's very good for generating recommendations and hypotheses, but it does have some disadvantages.
We don't actually know what happened to the children who didn't die.
So, you know, we don't know if there was a difference in how many of those were using the various interventions that we were talking about.
And we don't necessarily know which interventions are most effective for tackling the problems identified.
So for example, for malaria, we don't actually know in this context.
Well, you know, just the net program needs to be modified.
Or is it about improving treatments when there is a lot of information in here about treatment,
seeking poor quality of care, which I haven't gone into and I haven't got time to go into, but it's a cut.
Long story short, that was a big part of the problem as well. People not getting the right treatments and the right time.
Okay. But moving on. So the next question,
which sort of comes out of this is how is malaria being managed in Mali focusing on malaria since that's the most important cause of death?
Which treatments are being used? Do they work?
So the study I'm going to tell you about next is something that we called the Retrospective Treatment Outcome Study.
And I'm pretty sure that's not something that you will have covered or will cover in this course,
because it's a slightly different innovative study design.
It's basically a sort of cross-sectional study.
But the idea was to interview parents of children about specific cases of malaria within a short record period.
So the idea was the fieldworkers would go to the village and look for families where a child had
had malaria and then interview them about what treatment they had taken within a short period.
That means within the last month to three months, basically, so that the parents are likely to remember what happened and what they did.
Because it's retrospective.
We had to use a syndromic definition of malaria, which means basically fever because you can't do blood tests retrospectively.
And the idea was to analyse what happened to the patients taking different treatments.
Were there any that were associated with particularly good or bad outcomes and adjust for confounding factors?
So in this study we looked at 952 case histories of children.
The majority of them had been treated at home, 40% had taken only modern medicine, 33% and combined modern and traditional medicine.
And 27% had taken only traditional medicine.
So what happened to them? Well, not surprisingly, those with uncomplicated malaria, virtually none of them died, but those with severe malaria.
The interesting thing is, if you look at the percentages who died.
26% of those who took modern treatment died and 11% of those who had taken traditional treatment died.
And you think hang on a minute. Isn't that the wrong way round?
Surely those who took traditional treatment should be more likely to die than those who took modern treatments.
If you assume that modern treatment works and traditional treatment is rubbish, but that those are the right numbers.
So that's a bit puzzling. And with this study design, you can't explain those numbers.
They are what they are. So we're going to go on to this poses some more questions.
So before I pose more questions, I'm going to pause and think about the advantages and disadvantages of this method,
since that's the sort of theme of tonight.
So it's quite a good method for measuring treatment, seeking behaviour in the whole population if you're interested in a specific illness.
We can look for associations between treatments and outcomes.
And it's quite good for generating hypotheses.
So we could hypothesise that modern medicine is rubbish or modern medicine is not being effectively applied,
or maybe the medicines are of bad quality or or people are just going there too late.
We could hypothesise that maybe the traditional medicine is working or some of them are working.
There are lots of hypotheses. We don't know if any of them are true. Disadvantages are that because it's retrospective, it's a presumed diagnosis.
So we're not actually sure that these patients have malaria. Maybe most of them didn't even have malaria.
Maybe it was something else. And also the major problem is that differences in our.
Comms could be due to differences between the patients.
Maybe those going to modern medicine are sicker than those who went to traditional medicine.
Not just differences between the treatments. So those are that's a common factor for observational studies.
You can't really attribute causation to any associations that you might find.
So the next question that comes out of this is why are children dying of severe malaria in spite of modern treatment?
So in order to try and answer this question, we decided to go to the hospital,
and this is the Castle Hospital and the regional capital of this area of Mali.
And if we zoom in on these panels, which you see when you come into the hospital, you'll see that the exit so means exits.
It's a francophone country and the exit sign points to an advert for the cemetery, which is not a bad summary of what happens in the hospital,
because an audit in 2002, which was a couple of years before we started working there,
found that the inpatient mortality was 24.3% in the paediatric ward.
That means if you have a child that goes in, that will there's a one in four chance they're going to die.
That's pretty bad. And 42% of those deaths were due to malaria, which was the number one cause of death.
Okay. So how to unpick this? Well, the first thing we decided to do was a case control study.
So we decided to look at 50 children who died and 50 survivors, and they were selected at random and the year 2005.
And we extracted the data retrospectively from their medical records and tried to compare
the key characteristics between the two groups to see if there was any obvious difference.
So this is a shortened version of the table from that study.
There wasn't any difference in the age. There wasn't a significant difference in the sex.
There was a significant difference on the type of malaria. So if you had severe anaemia, you were less likely to die.
If you had neurological, that means coma and convulsions, you were much more likely to die.
Duration of illness didn't seem to make much difference, so it's not necessarily that they're presenting late.
If anything, the ones who survived perhaps have have been ill slightly longer.
That's not significance. Length of hospital stay was very significant.
But then that's sort of obvious, isn't it? Because if you die, you're not going to be in hospital for so long.
And most of those many of those who died, died within 24 hours.
And the treatment they'd received before coming to hospital, there was no significant difference.
And again, interestingly, although it's not significant,
slightly more of the survivors appeared to have used traditional medicine, which is a bit odd and counter-intuitive.
Anyway, it is what it is. It doesn't give you any explanations.
It just shows you some interesting associations.
And the only ones that really come out are things that are sort of blindingly obvious, and I guess we knew already.
But it's interesting that this wasn't significant because we thought it might have been.
So advantages and disadvantages of the case. Control methods.
Yeah. And malaria with a clinic.
Was it? So this thing in the hospital, one would have hoped that they'd had blood tests to confirm the diagnosis.
Having said that, when we went to the hospital lab to look at the quality of the of the lab tests, that could be questionable.
I mean, the microscope was not in the best state.
And I mean, obviously, this was retrospective.
So we couldn't we couldn't check any of the any of the results.
But the following year, we did another study, which I'm about to tell you about.
And yeah, let's say that the hospital lab wasn't 100% accurate.
Hmm. But it's probably true that most of them probably did have malaria because there's a lot of malaria in that.
But. But there could have been some false positives included in that.
Yeah. So does anyone have any thoughts on what are the advantages or disadvantages of using a case control design?
In this case or in any case, why do you think we bother doing it?
Because it didn't actually give us anything very useful in the end. Well, we did it.
And I guess the reason a lot of people do case control is it's a quick and easy thing to do is quick and dirty.
You can the data's there. You can easily extract it. You know, it didn't take much time or effort or money to do it.
In this case, I'm not saying all case control studies are like that, but in this case,
that was certainly the reason, and we didn't end up publishing it, to be honest.
It was quite small numbers. We could have done bigger numbers.
But the other main advantage of it is that you can look at risk factors for a rare outcome such as death,
which in this context actually unfortunately wasn't that rare.
But in theory, if you have got a rare outcome, it does enable you to do things that you otherwise might not be able to do.
The disadvantages specifically, particularly for this study,
we were limited to the information contained in the medical records because it was retrospective.
But actually I think a lot of case control studies are probably like that. You're using someone else's data.
You can't always define what you actually want in there.
You can't derive figures on prevalence of different risk factors because you haven't got the
whole population and you can't do any interesting analysis like regression or survival analysis.
So you're fairly limited as to what you can do.
But it's a quick and dirty way of getting an idea of what, you know, might be some interesting things to look at.
So the next thing we decided to do was a prospective cohort study.
So in this we decided to follow up. Every child admitted with severe malaria over a two month period in this hospital.
And we would because it's prospective, we were able to interview the parents at the time when they came into the hospital,
we were able to ask them questions about all the things we were interested in and we were able to follow them up to death or discharge.
So sorry, this is rather small, but this is basically the results of regression analysis and it's cut a long story short,
it confirmed what the case control had shown, that there was no significant difference as to what treatment they taken before coming to hospital.
It did confirm that the type of malaria made a big difference.
So if you were in coma six times more likely to die, respiratory distress was significant and blood sugar level.
Having a low blood sugar level was very significant as well.
But interestingly and completely unexpectedly, one of the risk factors was being female.
So girls were twice as likely to die as boys.
And again, there's no explanation for that. But that is what we found in this particular cohort.
So we did a survival analysis as well, and the only thing that came out, we didn't include in this the type of malaria,
but we were looking particularly interested in pre-hospital treatment and pre-hospital risk factors.
And the only thing that came out as being highly significant was being female.
So girls were much more likely to die than boys.
And we also did a regression analysis on glucose blood sugar at admission,
and that we found there was an almost linear relationship between blood sugar on admission and death,
which is quite interesting because W.H.O. guidelines and other guidelines sort of assume that there's a CUT-OFF at 4.4.
But this actually showed that, you know, actually the higher your blood sugar,
the more greater chance you have of surviving, which is quite interesting.
The one thing we couldn't do, unfortunately,
which we which is the thing that we really wanted to do is a before and after comparison of our treatment package.
Because together with this cohort study, when we were admitting the children,
we were implementing an improved protocol because we suspected that the quality of care was probably not as good as it could be.
And therefore we wrote a protocol on improved quality of care.
We provided free treatment for the children that were included in the study,
and we were hoping that we might be able to show a reduction in in-hospital case fatality compared to previous years.
And we assumed stupidly, very stupidly with hindsight that the hospital we could use the hospital statistics on mortality.
That was a bad idea because it turns out that the hospital statistics on deaths were completely inaccurate.
And if a child died 5 minutes after coming into hospital or before receiving any treatments,
even if that that was a few hours after coming into hospital or if it was a death that the junior doctor would rather not be criticised about by his.
Sultan's. The file was conveniently ripped up and disappeared into the dustbin and did not enter into the hospital statistics prior to our study.
So the red line is the mortality rate.
In the year when we were doing the cohort study, which we started in July and August and the previous years, are here.
But actually the before data is probably a massive underestimate of what the mortality really was.
If they had been using the same measure that we were using,
which was every child who arrived breathing and alive in the paediatric departments, how many of them died?
So this unfortunately we weren't able to publish or use.
So there's a lesson in that. Okay.
So the next question then, which came out is going back to that treatment outcomes study,
we've sort of looked at the modern medicine side and we've worked out that probably although it was difficult to show it using the cohort study,
but probably the quality of care was not as good as it should have been in the hospital,
which might explain parts of partly why children die in spite of receiving more than treatments.
The second question, which we were interested in, is, are any of the traditional medicines actually associated with good outcomes?
And obviously that group of traditional medicines is large.
So how do you unpick that?
Well, let's go back to the retrospective treatment outcomes study and think for a minute about how we might look at the data.
So it's essentially a population survey looking at what treatments people have taken.
And in this hypothetical example, lots of people have taken treatment.
Three, a few have taken treatment one, and not many have taken treatment two.
And people who are interested in traditional medicine tend to do what they call an ethno botanical survey,
where you go and interview people and find out what treatments they take for this illness or that illness.
And traditionally, they think, well, you know, the treatment that's taken by most people must be the most interesting one because most people use it.
But is that assumption correct? Maybe not.
Maybe patients have different outcomes, you know, that aren't correlated with how many people have taken them.
So in this hypothetical example, treatment three is taken by lots of people, but most of them don't get better.
Treatment two is taken by a small number of patients, but most of them actually do get better.
So that's the treatment that we want to find, not this one.
So we analysed the results from the Retrospective Treatment Outcome study in this way,
and this is a summary of the top three traditional medicines, herbal medicines.
The full table included 66 or 66 different plants being used in this area, mainly by different people.
And the top one, everyone who took it, only 30 people took it, but everyone who took it said they got better.
So we thought that looks quite interesting. And that was significantly better than the next ones down.
So it was tested. Then we got it tested in the laboratory, in the test tube to see if it killed malaria parasites.
And it did. That was one of four plants that had a good inhibitory concentration.
And as I said, it was associated with good clinical recovery. So we thought, well, maybe this is interesting, maybe we should look into this further.
So what should we do next? You can't really do a clinical trial in something that's, you know, that has you've only got retrospective data wrong.
So we thought, why don't we actually observe and see what happens to those patients who take only Mexicana Tea in home based management of malaria?
Is it safe? If we were to do a trial, what dose should be used?
So we decided to do an observational study.
I've put stroke phase two because it's almost like a face to face to uncontrolled clinical trial.
You'll see one hesitating between the two in a minute.
So our original idea was to simply observe patients for taking this, but to do it prospectively and to confirm the diagnosis of malaria.
Because obviously, as I mentioned, the retrospective one, we're not sure if they did have malaria because it was retrospective.
So we had to find a place where people were using this traditional medicine.
And the place we came upon was this village called McDougall, which was about 40 kilometres from the nearest health centre.
There's no electricity or running water. This is the road which during the malaria season gets blocked by rivers that appear out of nowhere.
So as you can imagine, access to the health centre is not very.
See, and most people don't bother going to the health centre unless they're at death's door.
The village chief was a traditional healer who had learned about the use of this plant from his own grandfather.
So there was three generations of experience of using this plant in his village and he welcomed us with open arms and gave us this little house,
lent us this little house to be our laboratory and study centre.
So with some solar panels on the roof,
we were able to run a microscope and a little centrifuge so we could do haematocrit of white blood, white blood cell counts.
We could do EKGs. And the basic idea was to observe patients who came to the traditional healer
and then do some blood tests to confirm the diagnosis and follow them up.
So we included everyone who the traditional healer had decided to treat with his herbal medicine,
who we agreed had a diagnosis of malaria, where that was confirmed on a blood test.
There was no other obvious cause of fever. They didn't have severe malaria.
Those we sent straight to the hospital and where the parents gave their consent.
And we had a pharmacy students who helped a lot with recruiting the patients, and he observed the doses being given by the traditional healer.
So when we followed people up to date 28 by doing consultations, clinical examination, blood tests, etc., now this is where it gets interesting.
We have plans to have different groups of doses, but after the first group of patients,
we were starting to be rather disappointed because most of them weren't getting better.
But we'd noticed that the traditional healer was giving them one glass once a day for three days of his decoction.
And so we decided to have a meeting with him when we asked him, Is this really what you would normally do if we weren't here?
And he said, Well, no, of course not. If you weren't here, I would just give them the stuff and tell them to go home and drink as much as they can.
And so and we said, so why are you giving them one class a day for three days?
And he said, Well, that's much more scientific, isn't it? That's how you give chloroquine one tablet a day for three days.
Okay. So we decided then to try and standardise what he meant by go home and drink as much as you can.
So we decided that the second group, which we called Group B, to give them one glass twice a day for seven days.
And then Group C got one glass four times a day for the first four days, and then twice a day, up to seven days.
And they weren't randomised, but the characteristics were fairly similar between the groups.
The majority of patients were children, equal proportions of girls and boys, and there was a big difference in the percentage who got better.
So the first group, only 39% got better.
The second group, 72 and a half percent got better. And the third group, interestingly, was no different.
So there was a big difference, a significant difference between these two groups, which was quite interesting.
And the parasite counts came down almost to zero, but not completely to zero in most of the patients.
There were a few side effects, nothing very serious, except at the highest dose.
A couple of patients had EKG changes. So we concluded from this study that it appeared to be appeared to be effective in a dose escalating study.
So it it sort of morphed from an observational study into a dose escalating study.
The optimal dosage was twice a day for one week, and that dosage appeared to be safe and well tolerated.
So the advantages and disadvantages of this sort of study,
it's quite useful for establishing the best dose and it's useful for establishing a safety profile.
But you can't really be certain about the efficacy because we don't have a control group and in a setting,
especially where there's lots of immunity to malaria, it's possible that all these patients might have got better anyway.
We don't know. But that's, you know, so we can't be sure that it's effective.
I mean, I guess what's in our favour is the fact that the first group who took an undue dose, actually most of them didn't get better.
So with hindsight, this is probably what we were trying to do and perhaps what we would do in a more structured way another time,
which is that if you've got a range of doses traditionally recommended,
if you're looking at a traditional medicine, you might start with the lowest dose and then look at what the clinical results are.
If it's good and it's safe, then that's fine. If it's if it's good, but it's not safe, then you would decrease the dose.
If it's not good, but it's safe, then you can increase the dose and you keep going around until you hit one of these two.
So at this stage, people in Mali started to get quite interested and this chap was the head of the malaria control program at the time.
He actually came to visit the village and look at the herbal medicine, etc. and we had a meeting with the villagers.
So I asked them, what what do you think we should do next?
What we do best way forward. And everyone agreed they wanted to carry on with the research.
And the question we really wanted to ask is, is this tea effective in home based management of malaria?
So in order to answer that question, we decided we needed to do an AZT.
And this is our Pico question. It looks from the board that you've been doing Pico today.
Is this you? Yeah. Okay. So the of.
Patients with those with presumed uncomplicated malaria of all ages,
because that would be the group for home based management of malaria presumed because there are no blood tests in the village.
So we include everyone, even those who may not actually have malaria.
The intervention was the argument in Mexico on a decoction twice a day for 7 to 14 days.
The comparison was assassinated mode you couldn't, which at the at the time was the standard treatment for malaria.
And the outcome measures that we were interested in were clinical recovery, which we defined as no need for a second treatment.
Incidence of new clinical episodes of malaria and incidence of severe malaria.
There were, of course, some ethical issues. This is an unproven herbal remedy, although it is widely used and widely available.
Our testing etymology coin is known to be effective and was recommended by W.H.O. but wasn't yet widely available in this area.
Malaria is potentially fatal, so if you were on the Ethics Committee, would you give ethical approval to this trial in the UK?
The answer is probably, almost certainly no.
But in Mali, if the Ethics Committee said yes because they thought this was an important question that needed to be answered.
So they gave us approval to go ahead with this study. Sample size, we I don't know if you've talked about this yet,
but we were assuming that at least 85% of patients on the modern medicine would not need three treatments.
And we hypothesise that the herbal medicine is noninferior to the artemisinin combination therapy,
which is the standard treatment, and we'd need to detect a difference of greater than 15%.
And so we plugged the numbers into the standard sample and we came up with a sample size of 119 per group.
So we randomised patients in a 2 to 1 ratio to the herbal medicine versus the ACTU.
The reason for that is we felt there wasn't much information about the herbal medicine at all,
whereas there was already quite a lot of information about the act.
So that's why we wanted to put twice as many patients into the herbal group and we stratified it into
different age groups because it's known that children under five are more likely to get severe malaria.
We discussed it with the community who were very happy and interested to go ahead.
So the study worked like this. Patients first came to see a village health worker who happened to be the traditional healers son.
He sort of delegated his role to his his son.
Anyone who he thought had fever was referred to the study team who were asked for consent.
And then we examined the patients, took the history, took blood tests, etc.,
and then they were randomised to herbal treatments or AZT and we followed them up for three months.
So out of 313 patients who came to see the healer with presumed malaria,
we only excluded 12 most of them because they had severe malaria or we live too far away, couldn't come back for follow up.
So 301 were included, 87% were positive for the malaria parasites.
So that's good. That means that most of them did have malaria and about 200 were randomised to the herbal medicine and about 100 to the active group.
And this is what happened. So the herbal medicine was slightly inferior to the modern one.
89% got better compared to 95% and 12.8% had a recurrence.
By day 28, compared to 9.9%. But, you know, it's they are fairly small differences.
And over the first 28 days, we had no deaths in either group, no severe malaria in those over five.
And in the under-fives, it was broadly the similar incidence of severe malaria in both groups.
No one had coma convulsions and there was slightly more adverse effects in the modern medicine group than in the herbal medicine group.
And then we followed them up to three months to look for severe malaria, and there was basically no difference between the groups,
although the study wasn't powered for this outcome because it's quite a rare outcome.
But the incidence is less than one would expect with no treatments, with no treatment.
You would expect in this population maybe 11% of severe malaria.
And this is quite an interesting graph.
So W.H.O., in its standard malaria protocols, looks for parasite clearance as part of the main outcome measure, which we explicitly didn't include.
We were interested in whether people got better clinically and whether they got severe malaria.
So these two lines show the percentage of patients who have any malaria parasites in their blood over the course of follow up.
And you can see there's a massive difference between the herbal medicine,
where most of the patients still had some malaria parasites in their blood and the artesunate,
where most of the patients cleared the parasites, although they gradually started creeping back over the course of follow up.
So if you were to use that, if we had used that as our primary outcome measure, the herbal medicine would have looked way worse than the modern one.
When you look at the clinical outcomes, new clinical episodes, there were more at day 28 in the Herbal Medicine Group.
We know that, but it's the second and the third month.
There was no difference between the groups. So it looks like having parasites in your blood is not as important as people might think,
especially in this sort of population where there are high levels of immunity.
And what perhaps really matters is the clinical outcomes.
So if you look at the cost of the two strategies, using the herbal medicine as first line with a conventional medicine as a backup.
Second line is obviously a lot cheaper than using the modern medicine as first line for everyone.
So it could be a useful first line home based treatment for uncomplicated malaria, especially in patients aged over five in this area.
But yeah, I mean, it's a strategy for maybe sparing modern medicines where they're not available or
if one has to give recommendations to people out of your 66 herbal medicines,
which one do you use? This one is probably better than nothing.
So reflecting back on the advantages and disadvantages of doing an r, c, t with the advantages,
obviously it's the gold standard for establishing efficacy disadvantages.
It's quite expensive and complicated to do. It's not very efficient for developing or optimising an intervention you couldn't
really do in our seats on each different dosage regimen or each different preparation.
You have to be quite fairly convinced before you start that you've got the best possible thing to trial and it's not always possible to do an c t.
I'm going to give you an example of that in a minute.
But just for a moment, reflecting about drug development, does anyone know how long it takes to develop a conventional, modern medicine?
Starting from the chemistry and whips. So after skin, you know it's starting from the chemistry and all of that.
It takes takes 15 years on average apparently and you know how much it costs be well the figure given in this particular article is $800 million.
And unfortunately, most of the time,
the end product is often unaffordable and unavailable to the poor people who really need it, especially in the case of malaria.
So actually, there are no drug companies investing their own money in developing new antimalarials all the new drug development
is being publicly funded and in comparison to that or scheme of finding a new antimalarial took six years,
starting with this retrospective treatment outcome study, then the dose escalating study than the randomised controlled trial.
We sort of did it backwards, we called it reverse pharmacology and at the end we started to look for active compounds,
not so much because we wanted to purify them,
but because we wanted to look at a tool for quality control, etc. But that's a whole other story that I haven't got time to go into now.
It cost about €0.4 million and the end product is easily affordable and available.
So it may not be such a bad way of doing things.
Going back to the confidential inquiry, which I mentioned at the beginning,
we did do a before and after study on that because we couldn't do a randomised controlled trial with the resources available
and we found that compared to 3.9% reduction in under-five mortality at the national level and most of our study sites,
there was a much greater mortality reduction except in one of them went up slightly.
But overall the under-five mortality reduced by 18% across the study sites.
Now this is a before and after study. It's not a randomised controlled trial.
So one might argue or what we could be criticised that maybe this reduction was due to other things going on.
Maybe there was some other reason. And it's true that in two of our study sites,
these two we were aware of another NGO that had come along halfway through the study and started giving free treatment for malaria and malnutrition.
And the other study, science. As far as we're aware, there wasn't anything else going on that could account for this reduction.
But if we really wanted to be sure about whether this is an effective thing to do, we would need to do a cluster randomised trial.
But when you start doing the power calculations and the budgeting it becomes very big and very expensive.
I think we worked out we would need to have at least 30 subdistricts and when we started costing it it was millions of pounds.
And we put we've put in several funding applications,
but we haven't yet found a funder who's willing to spend that amount of money on doing that randomised controlled trial.
So that's an example of where it hasn't been possible so far to do a randomised controlled trial.
So take home messages, choose the most important question to research and then pick the best design to answer this question in a way that's feasible,
unaffordable because you might not always be able to afford the best study design.
Don't be frightened to modify existing designs or even invent new designs.
If you can't find one that fits what you want to do and study designs at the bottom of the
evidence hierarchy are actually essential for generating hypotheses and developing interventions.
They might not be the final proof that people look at when they do meta analysis,
but you can't really get to a randomised trial until you've done all those bits before or some of those bits before.
So I think that's all I wanted to say.