What is KD-CAAP?

Kawasaki Disease Coronary Artery Aneurysm Prevention trial, or KD-CAAP is a clinical trial which has been designed by doctors to see if we can find better treatment for Kawasaki Disease in children.

With standard treatments, children with Kawasaki Disease currently have a very high risk of lifetime heart damage. Standard treatments just aren’t that good and there’s been no change in the medicines given for Kawasaki Disease in decades. So, we are really pleased that through this trial, doctors are working to find better treatments which might help more children recover from Kawasaki Disease without serious heart damage.

KD-CAAP is “a phase III multi-centre, randomised, open-label, blinded endpoint assessed, trial of corticosteroids plus intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) and aspirin, versus IVIG and aspirin for prevention of coronary artery aneurysms (CAA) in Kawasaki disease (KD)”.

That’s the really technical description! What that means is:

✅It’s a trial – or a way of comparing how good different medicines are when treating an illness

✅Both doctors and patients taking part will know which treatments are being given

✅ The end point is ‘blinded’ which means that any potential heart damage will be assessed by someone who does not know what treatment the participant is receiving.

✅One extra medicine (corticosteroids, often just called  ‘steroids’) will be given to half of the children – with the other half getting the standard treatment they’d get anyway if we hadn’t decided to do this trial (or if they didn’t join the trial)

✅We will be able to see how effective the two treatments are the end of the trial, based on everything we find out

Why do doctors do clinical trials?

Whilst there are treatments available for most illnesses, doctors are always looking for ways to improve treatments.

Kawasaki Disease is no exception! The treatments for Kawasaki Disease haven’t really changed for a long time and recent research (UK and Ireland, but also elsewhere in Europe) shows that a very high proportion of children suffer serious heart damage, even when they receive the current recommended treatments.

Doctors in the U.K., working with Societi Foundation, have developed this clinical trial to see if a better treatment can be found. So KD-CAAP has been designed to investigate whether giving an extra treatment for Kawasaki Disease might reduce the number of children who develop life long and life threatening heart damage, because of Kawasaki Disease.