Rheumatic Heart Disease in Children

The goal of this clinical trial is to test the effectiveness and implementation of enhanced Secondary Antibiotic Prophylaxis (SAP) supports using a hybrid type 1 effectiveness-implementation design. The purpose is to determine whether enhanced SAP supports will increase average SAP adherence in Brazil and Timor-Leste. The study will enroll people living with Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) and Community Health Workers (CHWs) participating in the intervention. The main questions it aims to answer are: * Whether CHW-led supports delivered within the community improve mean SAP adherence at 12 months post-intervention. * Whether the intervention demonstrates acceptability, feasibility, uptake and engagement. Researchers will compare baseline and post-intervention SAP adherence data for the 12 months prior to and following intervention rollout to see if CHW-delivered supports increase adherence.

The ACT4RHD trial is a multicentre, pragmatic, multi-arm, open-label adaptive platform trial addressing multiple therapeutic questions in patients with ARF and carditis. ACT4RHD aims to improve health outcomes for children and young people affected by ARF by finding treatments to reduce heart damage. The trial's Bayesian adaptive design enables multiple promising treatments to be tested at the same time. The trial will adapt by stopping treatments that are not effective sooner than traditional trials, adding new treatments as they become available, and answering research questions as soon as enough evidence has been collected. This flexibility allows researchers to identify the most effective treatments more quickly than traditional clinical trials.

This study will look at whether children ages 5-8 who take Penicillin V by mouth twice a day are less likely to develop rheumatic heart disease (RHD) over a 3-year period compared to children who do not take the medicine.

This study will look at how many children develop rheumatic heart disease (RHD) over a 3-year period. The study will include children ages 5 to 8 who do not have RHD at the start and who live in areas where the disease is common. Each child will have a heart ultrasound (echocardiogram) once a year for 3 years to check for signs of RHD. Doctors will diagnose RHD using internationally recognized guidelines from the World Heart Federation (2023). The study will also look at how often new cases occur each year, whether rates differ by age, sex, or location, and whether any children develop acute rheumatic fever during the study.

The overall objective of the PREVENT trial is to evaluate the effectiveness of an integrated, school-based program for the prevention of rheumatic heart disease (RHD) in regions with an endemic pattern of RHD. We conduct a stepped wedge cluster randomized trial in randomly selected schools in Nepal and Zambia. The intervention will be delivered at the level of the school and consists in the introduction of a dedicated school-nurse program providing health care through education about RHD, assessment, intervention, and follow-up of GABHS pharyngitis, and facilitation of secondary antibiotic prophylaxis for children with RHD.

This is a Phase I/IIa, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, dose-escalation clinical trial to test the candidate vaccine StreptInCor. The study will include four different doses (25 µg, 50 µg, 100 µg, and 200 µg) of StreptInCor produced under Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and formulated with aluminum hydroxide as the vaccine adjuvant. The adjuvant alone will be used as a placebo in this trial. Five groups, each consisting of twelve healthy adult volunteers, will randomly receive two doses of the vaccine or placebo with a 28-day interval, along with a booster dose six months after the initial vaccination

The overall objective is to evaluate the effectiveness of a school-centered primary and secondary prevention program on the prevalence of latent rheumatic heart disease among schoolchildren in Nepal, and to investigate the role of socioeconomic and environmental factors in the development and progression of rheumatic heart disease.