A clinical trial of drugs that can delay puberty can go ahead after a high court judge threw out a legal challenge on Friday.<\/p>\n
Campaigners had launched the attempt<\/a> to halt the planned research into puberty blockers, to be run by researchers at King\u2019s College London (KCL), on the grounds that they believed it could harm the children taking part.<\/p>\n But Mr Justice Chamberlain refused the application for a judicial review, saying none of their claims had a realistic chance of success in court. He said each patient involved in the Pathways trial would have been assessed over \u201cmany months\u201d by specialist doctors who would have \u201cformed the opinion that a child has a reasonable prospect of receiving a clinical benefit from the treatment\u201d.<\/p>\n The university welcomed the court\u2019s decision on Friday, saying particular care would be taken over the safety of participants of the trial, which will start recruiting more than 220 children aged between 11 and 16 years old from 1 August.<\/p>\n But opponents, including the psychotherapist James Esses and Keira Bell, who began taking puberty blockers as a teenager before later detransitioning, expressed sadness at the ruling.<\/p>\n Bell told the BBC: \u201cIt\u2019s a tragedy that the court has refused permission for this challenge to proceed. The medical profession and morality do not always walk hand in hand. If they did, this trial would be out of the question.\u201d<\/p>\n The Bayswater Group, which works with parents of gender-questioning children and was also part of the legal challenge, said: \u201cWe remain of the view that the Pathways trial does not meet the legal and ethical thresholds required for research on children.<\/p>\n \u201cThe design and scale of the study, the known and potential harms of the intervention, and the absence of a sufficient prior evidence base of benefit raise fundamental questions about whether the protective framework for minors has been properly implemented.\u201d<\/p>\n A spokesperson for KCL said: \u201cPathways trial is a carefully designed study to give much needed evidence about the potential benefits and risks of puberty suppression to improve NHS care.<\/p>\n \u201cA small number of young people with long-term gender incongruence, who have already received comprehensive psychological and social support through NHS gender services, will be eligible.\u201d<\/p>\n The spokesperson added that the study would have \u201cstrict eligibility requirements\u201d and that the trial\u2019s design had been \u201ccarefully reviewed by independent researchers and has been approved by the UK\u2019s health research regulators, the HRA and MHRA\u201d.<\/p>\n The study was originally commissioned in response to a 2024 review of gender identity services by Dr Hilary Cass, which found that gender medicine was an \u201carea of remarkably weak evidence\u201d and \u201cbuilt on shaky foundations\u201d<\/a>. Initially used to treat early onset puberty, puberty blockers<\/a> had been prescribed off-label to children with gender dysphoria until the NHS banned their use last year after the Cass review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A clinical trial of drugs that can delay puberty can go ahead after a high court judge threw…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":721562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-721561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=721561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/721562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}