Home vs postal testing for faecal calprotectin: a feasibility study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
A feasibility study to determine the patient acceptability, ease-of-use and adherence to an home testing kit for faecal calprotectin
IRAS ID
169290
Contact name
Bu'Hussain Hayee
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are forms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that require long-term monitoring. People with these conditions require regular and repeat testing, sometimes with endoscopy, to assess the state of the disease. Many centres worldwide now use a stool test called faecal calprotectin (FCALP) as an accurate reflection of endoscopic disease activity - meaning that people with IBD do not need 'routine' endoscopy to assess their disease. FCALP can also be used to give a prediction of what will happen to a person's IBD in the near future.
As such, FCALP is an excellent and highly cost-effective test in IBD. However, uptake is often low (as with all stool tests) particularly because the sample needs to be taken at home and delivered in to the laboratory or hospital to be tested. People still therefore need to make an effort to submit samples and find this inconvenient. Furthermore, treatments for IBD are increasingly being given at home (usually self-administered injections). While beneficial for people with IBD, it is more difficult to keep track of such patients in the hospital service as they attend less regularly. A test that can be done at home, while making results available to the hospital team, is therefore desirable.
New technology allows reliable testing of FCALP at home, using a smartphone app (IBDoc-TM, Buhlmann Laboratories) within a few minutes. The test kit is packaged with everything required (including gloves, sample 'capture' paper, disposal bag, etc). An instructional video is available within the app itself.
We wish to test, in a representative group of IBD patients, the acceptability of - and adherence to - the IBDoc test. We will also compare patients experiences of the IBDoc test, health anxieties, locus of control, and satisfaction vs postal and traditional 'drop-off' test.
REC name
Wales REC 6
REC reference
15/WA/0168
Date of REC Opinion
7 May 2015
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion