ARREST Trial - Have Your Questions Answered - Live Twitter Q&A
21 Jun 2018
On Tuesday 26 June 2018, 4.15pm until 5.00pm (BST), we'll be running a Twitter Q&A session about the ARREST trial - with the hashtag #ArrestTrial.
The Twitter Q&A is to promote the results of the ARREST trial, and how the trial will positively affect patients and healthcare professionals.
Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia is a common cause of severe community-acquired and hospital-acquired infection worldwide. The ARREST Trial examined whether adjunctive rifampicin would reduce bacteriologically confirmed treatment failure or disease recurrence, or death, by enhancing early S aureus killing, sterilising infected foci and blood faster, and reducing risks of dissemination and metastatic infection.
Between December 2012 and October 2016, 758 participants with an S aureus blood infection were randomly assigned to either 14 days of rifampicin or placebo in addition to standard backbone antibiotic therapy, as chosen by the attending physician. Everyone was followed up for 12 weeks, with the clinical assessments in hospital on days 0, 3, 7, 10 and 14 and then once per week until either discharge or week 12 - whichever occurred first.
We have a panel of experts ready and waiting to answer your questions.
Our Panel
Jennifer Bostock, Lay member of the ARREST Team
Jennifer Bostock was the lay member of the ARREST team bringing a patient/public perspective to the trial. Having had first-hand experience of serious infection and having lost people to infection Jennifer supported the work of the trial team by helping to recruit patients, advice on patient and carer facing documents and with professional expertise of the mental capacity act.
Fleur Hudson, Head of Trial & Study Management Group, MRC CTU at UCL
Fleur Hudson is the Head of Trial & Study Management at the MRC CTU at UCL. On ARREST, Fleur worked as the Clinical project manager throughout the duration of the study lifecycle.
Guy Thwaites, Chief Investigator, Director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit
Guy Thwaites is an academic infectious diseases physician and clinical microbiologist. He has been Director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit / Wellcome Programme in Vietnam since October 2013.
Sarah Walker, Professor in Medical Statistics and Epidemiology, MRC CTU at UCL
Sarah Walker is a statistician and trialist at the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL. She has been involved in the design, conduct and analysis of ARREST from the start of the discussions. She is keen to share what we have learnt about doing trials in such acutely sick patients, and what the results mean for future research and practice.
How to get involved!
Our panellists will be ready to answer questions from 4.15pm until 5.00pm on Tuesday 26 June (BST).
You can tweet within this 45-minute slot, or tweet your question before the session begins if you prefer. If you would like to participate but are not on Twitter, you can also email us your questions in advance.
To ask a question, just tweet using the hashtag #ArrestTrial. One of our panel will then reply to you from the @MRCCTU account.
As we have more than one panel member for our Q&A, the person who is answering your question will put their initials at the start of their tweet, so you know who is talking.
As well as answering your questions, we are also very interested to hear what you think - so if you want to contribute, tweet using the #ArrestTrial hashtag.
We will post a summary of the Q&A session on our website after the event, so even if you are not a Twitter user you can still see what was said.
Further information