We closed early to recruitment. Why?!

Recruitment to the STOPPIT-3 and STOPPIT-M trial closed earlier than anticipated at the end of November 2024. Despite the dedication and hard work of our research teams, this trial proved to be a very difficult trial to recruit to.

What have we learned?

We often found that women who were pregnant with twins and were keen to participate were not able to take part because they went in to early labour.

We also found that women who were pregnant with twins were hesitant to agree to take part. There are a wide number of very understandable reasons for this, and we will examine these in more detail with our expert research team who will evaluate our journey so that the research community can learn from our experiences. We will publish this qualitative evaluation in due course, likely by Spring 2027. We will of course share these findings on our website and social media pages for everyone to read.

We are very grateful to the 100+ women who did participate in the trial. In this trial we had hoped to learn more about whether giving antenatal corticosteroids (ACS) is better than no treatment. We will work with our statisticians to publish the findings of the data we collected from the women who took part. Due to the low number of participants, these findings will not be enough to draw a conclusion which can influence clinical practice but it will ensure the important conversations around the use of steroids in twin pregnancies continues and it will also allow future researchers to gain insight in to any trends in the data which can influence how they design the next study. We hope to publish these results by Spring 2027. We will share these on our website and on our social media pages.

Wait! We are not closing just yet!

We still have another important question we can try to answer. When our participants signed up, they also agreed to complete a PARCA-R questionnaire for each child. The PARCA-R is a questionnaire that parents or carers complete to assess their child's cognitive and language development at 24 months of age. It is used in child development clinics and in research studies. We will still collect these questionnaires from our participants and publish the findings. If you are a participant then you will receive an email or an envelope through the letter box shortly after the twins reach 2 years of age.

Questions?

If you have any questions then you can email the trial team on stoppit.trial@ed.ac.uk or click the ‘Contact Us’ button on the website.