Loughborough University
Browse

Patient acceptability of larval therapy for leg ulcer treatment: a randomised survey to inform the sample size calculation of a randomised trial

Download (196.58 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2015-09-22, 13:08 authored by Emily PetherickEmily Petherick, S. O'Meara, Kate L. Spilsbury, C.P. Iglesias, E.A. Nelson, D.J. Torgerson
Background: A trial was commissioned to evaluate the effectiveness of larval therapy to debride and heal sloughy and necrotic venous leg ulcers. Larval therapy in the trial was to be delivered in either loose or bagged form. Researchers were concerned that resistance to larval therapy may threaten the feasibility of the trial. Additionally there was concern that the use of larval therapy may require a larger effect size in time to healing than originally proposed by the investigators. Methods: To formally evaluate patient preferences a survey using two randomly allocated, nurse administered questionnaires was undertaken. Patients were randomised to receive one of the two following questionnaires (i) preferences between loose larvae and standard treatment (hydrogel) or (ii) patient preferences between bagged larvae and standard therapy (hydrogel). The study was undertaken in a Vascular Clinic, in an Outpatients Department of a large teaching hospital in the North of England. The sample consisted of 35 people aged 18 years and above with at least one leg ulcer of venous or mixed (venous and arterial) aetiology. Results: Approximately 25% of participants would not consider the use of larval therapy as an acceptable treatment option for leg ulcers, regardless of the method of containment. For the patients that would consider the use of larval therapy, different preferences in healing times required to use the therapy were observed depending upon the method of containment. The median response of those participants questioned about bagged larvae found that they would be willing to use this therapy even if they were equally able to achieve healing with the use of hydrogel by 20 weeks. For those participants questioned about the use of loose larvae complete healing would have to have taken place over 17 weeks for them to choose larvae as their preferred option rather than hydrogel. This difference was not significant (p = 0.075). Conclusion: We found no evidence of widespread resistance to the utilisation of larval therapy from patients regardless of the method of larval therapy containment. These methods have the potential to inform sample size calculations where there are concerns of patient acceptability. © 2006 Petherick et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Health through its Health Technology Assessment Programme.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

BMC Medical Research Methodology

Volume

6

Citation

PETHERICK, E.S. ... et al, 2006. Patient acceptability of larval therapy for leg ulcer treatment: a randomised survey to inform the sample size calculation of a randomised trial. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 6 (43), 4pp.

Publisher

© 2006 Petherick et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International (CC BY 2.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Publication date

2006

Notes

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ISSN

1471-2288

eISSN

1471-2288

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Licence

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC