Why it's important to take your study tablets
Does taking iron tablets during pregnancy help to prevent anaemia?
In PANDA, we want to answer the question: Does taking iron tablets during pregnancy help to prevent anaemia?
We have done a previous study in PANDA to find out what dose of iron is best to give pregnant women and what dose women found comfortable to take. In this next part of PANDA, the study you might take part in or are already taking part in, we are interested in finding out if taking iron tablets during pregnancy can help to stop anaemia from developing when you are pregnant.
It is important to remember that when you start this study you are allocated to one of two groups at random (like tossing a coin) to either take an iron tablet or to take a placebo (‘dummy’ pill). We will not know, and you will not know, which tablet you are taking. We will be asking 11,000 pregnant women to get involved.
What is my role in PANDA?
Taking tablets as recommended can be difficult to do for lots of different reasons.
To help us understand if taking iron during pregnancy helps to prevent anaemia we need all women on the PANDA study to take their study tablets (whether this is the iron tablet or the placebo ‘dummy pill’) as closely as possible to what was recommended.
For some advice and tips to help with this, see tips for taking your study tablets.
What happens if I don't take my study tablets as prescribed?
We are trying to work out if giving iron tablets during pregnancy stops anaemia from developing.
We can only do this if women taking part do their best to take their study tablets as recommended.
If women don’t take their tablets as recommended, and we find that taking iron during pregnancy does not seem to prevent anaemia, we will be unable to know if this is because taking iron does not work or because women did not manage to take the amount of iron we recommended.
If you can’t take the tablets for any reason, please let the research team know. They can then account for the missing doses when they do the analysis to help interpret findings more accurately.