REMAIN Study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Remote Extra-clinic Monitoring of ADHD In the NHS (REMAIN) Study
IRAS ID
252861
Contact name
Johnny Downs
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King's College London
ISRCTN Number
ISRCTN00000000
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
n/a, n/a
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 0 days
Research summary
One in 25 children have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a diagnosis characterised by severe and persistent problems with inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity both at home and at school. Over a lifetime, these symptoms can negatively affect people’s education, ability to form and maintain friendships, and later on, job prospects, relationships and health. Medication can help manage symptoms but needs to be closely monitored by doctors to ensure safe and effective treatment. Issues with over and under prescribing can result in side-effects which make matters worse or mean the difficulties remain.
There are problems with how side effects and treatment effectiveness are checked. National guidelines recommend that parents and teachers regularly complete paper questionnaires about symptoms when starting ADHD medication. These rarely get back to the doctor or enter a child’s health record, due to clinicians being overstretched. Frequent differences between parents’ and teachers’ assessments on the same child can also make it hard to determine which report is more accurate.
The REMAIN will co-develop with families a digital package of online questionnaires, attention tasks and wrist-worn activity trackers (wearables) to address these issues. It will explore whether they can improve current assessment of medication effects.
The study will recruit 80 children and their parents from standard community ADHD clinics and invite them to use the digital package over 12 weeks. Parents will be asked to complete online questionnaires. Before, during and after this, feedback and suggestions from children, parents, teachers and clinicians on how to improve these technologies will be gathered. Activity and attention patterns will also be examined to examine whether they change as expected of course their ADHD care. Findings from this pilot will help inform an effective and efficient full scale REMAIN study conducted in a way that is most acceptable to children, parents, teachers, and clinicians.
REC name
London - Camden & Kings Cross Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
21/LO/0166
Date of REC Opinion
5 May 2021
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion