ANZCTR search results

We hypothesised that pain generated by tourniquet after exsanguination of lower limb with Esmarch is significantly lower comparing with pain from elevated lower limb for one minute and applied same type of tourniquet. We intend to record pain score generated by these two methods of exsanguination every 2 minutes for 20 minutes of tourniquet type and for 10 minutes after tourniquet is released. Pain curve will be the primary parameters where the pain in each point of time and time of full recovery will be the second paremetres. We will use one leg of participant for Esmarch group and the second leg for elevation group. Sides of interventions will be randomly chosen.

Overseas-born gay, bisexual men and other men who have sex with men (Ob-GBM) populations are at an increased risk of HIV in Australia. Despite the availability of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), they experience socio-cultural, and systemic barriers to accessing PrEP as an effective HIV prevention biomedical tool. Behavioural economics is a relatively new field, that is being applied by governments in policies and interventions to alter an individual’s behaviour in a predictable and cost-effective manner. It can be a powerful approach that blends psychological insights with economic decision-making processes of individuals, through ‘nudges’. A nudge is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives, such as using the default option, or social norms. For example, in health, nudges have been applied to improve the rate of organ donations, and to increase the rate of attendance at hospital consultations. In the field of HIV, the application of behavioural economics is also novel, and this study aims to contribute to the evidence of applications of nudges in HIV-related interventions. This study aims to run an online (social media) nudge campaign to improve PrEP awareness and access through an ad campaign on social media platforms that target particularly among (overseas-born gay, bisexual men, and men who have sex with men (Ob-GBM) populations in Australia.

People with chronic pain find that osteoarthritis can severely disrupt their life, robbing them of the pleasure of conducting simple daily activities. The present lack of effective medications means chronic pain is inadequately managed. Regular medications such as paracetamol are non-curative. Stronger medications, on the other hand, can cause drowsiness and/or unsteadiness. Furthermore, for opioids, the induced analgesia attenuates over time. The potential of cannabinoids for the treatment of osteoarthritis so far has not been fully appreciated. Published systematic reviews in the literature for the safety, efficacy and tolerability of cannabinoids in arthritis are scarce and have limitations that prevent meta-analyses. The aims of this study are: Stage 1: Determine the pharmacokinetics of CBD and PEA applied to skin Stage 2: Perform a randomised phase IIa double blind, placebo-controlled, three-arm cross-over study to examine the tolerability and efficacy of CBD and PEA in osteoarthritic joint pain. This research has been initiated by Prof Nicholas Manolios, Head of Department of Rheumatology, Westmead Hospital. This research has been funded by the Westmead Research Foundation. The funding body has no input into conduct of the research.

This trial will investigate the use of a social humanoid robot to deliver a novel cognitive flexibility intervention designed to help people to use flexible thinking patterns to overcome cognitive biases or distortions. It is intended that this trial will support university students by teaching them new techniques to help overcome thinking traps and how to better deal with negative automatic thoughts.

The proposed study will involve implementing and testing Tuning Relationships with Music (TRM) at the Gippsland Centre Against Sexual Assault. TRM is an intervention that aims to help parents and adolescents (10 – 18 years) impacted by sexual and/or physical violence improve the quality of their relationship.. A pilot study (Colegrove et al., 2018) found that participation in Tuning Relationships with Music (TRM) led to significant reductions in parent-adolescent conflict and parent reactivity, and improved parental responsiveness. This study is a next step to evaluate how effective TRM is when used in the real-world setting. It is hypothesised that participation will lead to changes in parent responsiveness and reactivity, parent-adolescent health, and parent/adolescent mental health. It is also hypothesised that the study will advance knowledge about whether counsellors experience TRM as an acceptable and appropriate intervention for parents and adolescents impacted by sexual and/or physical abuse.

The COVID-19 rehabilitation service at the University of Canberra Hospital has been established in April 2022. The service hinges on sound principles of thorough patient assessment and medical screening; individualized patient-centred care planning; carefully prescribed and supervised graded exercise therapy by trained therapists; and holistic management of a wide range of physical, cognitive, psychological and social problems to best meet the needs of our ACT people still struggling to recover from COVID-19. From benchmarking exercises, we know that there is no other established multidisciplinary COVID-19 recovery service in Australia. As a collaborative research team, we want to take this opportunity to capture data regarding this service’s usual practice, and hope to demonstrate that this novel approach to COVID-19 rehabilitation (including graded exercise therapy) is feasible and safe. Usual practice will include prescribed exercises where indicated, including retraining of respiratory muscles where these are weak (a potential contributor to breathlessness, particularly in ICU survivors). We also want to capture the patients’ experience of this service, to ascertain the acceptability of this model of care. If we can demonstrate that this approach does not harm patients, and is acceptable to patients, we may encourage COVID-19 rehabilitation clinics around the world to re-think their approach to COVID-19 recovery, and lead the world in generating the evidence needed to inform best practice.

This study is looking at how COVID-19 has affected people including their fitness, health and quality of life after their initial infection. Where effects persist for 12 weeks after infection, this is known as Long COVID. Even people who had relatively mild COVID-19 at the time can experience long COVID symptoms. Doctors are in the early stages of understanding this condition and there are a variety of different symptoms affecting many parts of the body. Symptoms can include fatigue, breathlessness, a cough that won’t go away, joint pain, muscle aches, hearing and eyesight problems, headaches, loss of smell and taste as well as problems affecting the heart, lungs, kidneys and gut. Mental health problems have also been reported including depression, anxiety and struggling to think clearly or ‘brain fog’. Clinicians will use questionnaires developed across the world for this purpose, to help gather this information and observe the treatments used. Information obtained from this study will help clinicians understand how best to identify and manage Long COVID.

This study is a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, dose-ranging crossover study, investigating the effects of purified, oral cannabidiol (CBD) on affective and physiological responses to aerobic exercise in healthy trained individuals. Participants will attend the study site on four occasions to complete an initial eligibility screen and three treatment sessions. Each treatment session will involve a controlled bout of submaximal exercise (i.e., 60 minutes of running at a fixed, moderate intensity, ~70% VO2max), a short (30 minute) recovery and an incremental run to volitional exhaustion. Individuals will receive placebo or an acute dose of CBD (50mg or 300 mg) 1.5-hours prior to the onset of exercise on each occasion. We hypothesise that CBD will improve overall exercise tolerance; that is, it will increase affective valence, decrease relative VO2 (i.e., % VO2max) during submaximal exercise and increase time to exhaustion (TTE).

Targeted lifestyle interventions that include education, behaviour change and/or group support components could be effective in improving the lifestyle risk factors, increased falls risk and poorer mental health status associated with hearing loss. This study therefore aims to develop, implement and evaluate an online intervention called Walk, Talk and Listen over Zoom (WTL-Zoom). This will be achieved over two phases: 1) a small qualitative study (semi-structured interviews) with older adults with hearing loss to determine the barriers and facilitators to participating in such a program; and 2) applying the findings from phase 1 to inform the development of the WTL-Zoom, followed by a pilot study to evaluate its feasibility and acceptability. Participants for both phases will be primarily recruited from Macquarie University's MQ Health Speech and Hearing Clinic, as well as via university-based advertisements. For the Phase 2 intervention, participants will be divided into subgroups based on their preference of available sessions (morning/afternoon). Sessions will run for 60-minutes once/week over ten-weeks with up to 10 participants per group. Each session including informal socialising and alternating; physical activity with social interaction (PASI) and group auditory rehabilitation (GAR) sessions. In total, there will be five PASI sessions, each running for approximately 30 minutes. These sessions will include mindful breathing, warm-up exercises (e.g., stretching and bodyweight strengthening exercises), moderate-to-vigorous intensity shadow boxing, and cool down exercises (e.g., bodyweight strengthening, balance exercises). There will also be a total of five GAR sessions. These sessions are based on the Ida Institute’s GROUP (Group Rehabilitation Online Utility Pack) program and will run for approximately 30-45 minutes. These sessions will include 1) GAR overview, communication of shared experiences, and goal setting using the Client Oriented Scale of Improvement (COSI) questionnaire; 2) education on understanding hearing loss and impacts on communication; 3) communication strategies: conversational fluency and assertiveness; 4) stress management and personal adjustment; and 5) communication programs and consumer support organisations, review of goals from session 1. A few minutes at the start sessions 2-5 will review the content covered in the previous session.

This is a first in human study designed to investigate the safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of a single dose of FT-104 HCL in healthy volunteers.