Jane Feinmann
A clinical trial of puberty blockers for managing children and adolescents with gender incongruence, announced in February,1 still awaits regulatory and ethical approval, amid warnings by clinicians that they would be unwilling to assess patients’ eligibility for inclusion in the study.
The trial, which is costing £10.7m and due to run until January 2031, is funded by NHS England and is being carried out by an independent study team led by Emily Simonoff, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at King’s College London.
The Pathways (puberty suppression and transitional healthcare with adaptive youth services) study will “track the physical, social, and emotional wellbeing” over two years of young people attending one of the newly established NHS gender service clinics who “want to delay puberty and whose parents and Gender Service agree with this treatment option.”
As such, recruitment to the trial will be the only way for under 18s in the UK to get puberty blockers, after the closure of the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in London in July last year and then the ban on NHS and private prescriptions of the drugs by the health and social care …