Research question: What are the most effective and safe ways to use emollients topical corticosteroids in combination to treat children with eczema?
There is currently no cure for eczema, so the treatment goal is control of the disease. A wide array of new and emerging topical agents are in development for childhood eczema and hold therapeutic promise. This has important implications for first-line therapies for eczema management which often include emollients combined with anti-inflammatory therapies such as topical corticosteroids.
The initial work package aims to improve our understanding of real-world use of topical treatments and comprises two parts:
- A systematic review of the literature on real world topical treatments for childhood eczema. This review will be conducted based on PRISMA guidelines and will only include studies on real world use. This excludes randomized controlled trials.
- Surveys and interviews with patients with eczema, their parents/carers and healthcare professionals involved in eczema treatment. This study builds on from the systematic review by further exploring patterns of real-world eczema treatment including barriers and enablers to use and reasons for use.
We anticipate that findings from this work package will inform the co-design of a clinical trial of the optimal ways to use emollients and topical corticosteroids in combination.
October 2024 Update
- The literature review is well under way, with a focus on several aspects of topical treatment use, including: patterns of use, safety, effectiveness and usability. The literature has yielded fairly complicated results and the team are now working to find the best way to present the findings.
- The NHS ethics application has been submitted with a view to start surveys from March 2025, with a subset of survey respondents invited to take part in interviews.