TIME Makes Encouraging Start across the UK 

TIME (Treatment In Morning vs Evening) is looking at patients taking once a day blood pressure medication, aiming to establish whether night time dosing is better (or worse) than morning time treatment in preventing heart attacks, strokes, and deaths related to diseases of the heart and circulation.

The study is being undertaken by a team based at the University of Dundee led by Professor Tom MacDonald and is backed by a British Heart Foundation research grant. The TIME study is currently recruiting patients across the UK following a successful pilot which has been ongoing since 2011.

Who is eligible?

Recruitment to the study is open to anyone in the UK who takes tablets for blood pressure once daily. The aim is to recruit 10,000 participants of as varied demographics as possible and study them over a period of five years. Patients are being invited via GP surgeries and hospitals and by their responding directly to advertising or social media.

Participants are randomly allocated to either take anti-hypertensive medication at night or in the morning, and the study is conducted entirely online with patients registering and consenting online and being followed up by email.

Participants need to have regular access to the internet, as this study is done entirely through a secure website and all contact is by email.

Although this excludes a certain proportion of patients, for practical and financial reasons it would be difficult to do a study of this size in the conventional way. Previous studies that have used this method found it to yield high quality and cost-effective data.

Patients register for the study at www.timestudy.co.uk, where they can read more detailed information. Consent for the study is completed by the patient online and they then input study data.

GP practice recruitment for the TIME study

An initial mailing in 2014 to GP practices has been followed up by the Research Networks in all UK countries, and local approvals are being granted to allow interested practices to be registered as Patient Identification Centres (PICs) to invite suitable patients.

To facilitate the mailing to patients and minimise the costs to practices, an account has been established for the study on Docmail which can be used to mail patients and so far this has been used in 32 practices in the West Midlands, which has been at the forefront of activity for the study. The West Midlands is the lead region for the study in England. Other regions are now also starting on the recruitment process with new practices continuing to register their interest.

Involvement of hospital clinics

Patient recruitment from hospital clinics is also possible and there has been considerable interest from hospital trusts across the UK and several have already been set up as PICs to be able to invite their patients. Anyone who is interested in finding out more about this can contact the co-ordinating centre in Dundee at TIME-study@dundee.ac.uk

Study aim

If showing that the time of day patients take their blood pressure medication can have an effect on events such as strokes and heart attacks, this would provide enormous health benefits. Even getting a modest effect within our study could imply an incredible benefit to the population at large.