diff --git a/DESCRIPTION b/DESCRIPTION
index dac5a87..507812e 100644
--- a/DESCRIPTION
+++ b/DESCRIPTION
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 Package: alspac
 Title: Data dictionary for ALSPAC
 Description: Functions to search and extract variables based on keywords from the ALSPAC data dictionary
-Version: 0.44.0
+Version: 0.44.1
 Authors@R: c(person("Gibran", "Hemani", email = "g.hemani@bristol.ac.uk",
                   role = c("aut", "cre")),
              person("Matthew", "Suderman", email = "matt.suderman@bristol.ac.uk",
diff --git a/R/zzz.r b/R/zzz.r
index 2439759..af226b1 100644
--- a/R/zzz.r
+++ b/R/zzz.r
@@ -4,10 +4,24 @@
     message("This may lead to slightly different formatting compared to previously.")
     message("See also the new createDictionary function.")
 
+    a <- suppressWarnings(try(readLines("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/explodecomputer/alspac/master/DESCRIPTION"), silent=TRUE))
+
+    if(!inherits(a, 'try-error'))
+    {
+        latest <- gsub("Version: ", "", a[grep("Version", a)])
+        current = utils::packageDescription('alspac')
+
+        test <- utils::compareVersion(latest, current$Version)
+        if(test == 1)
+        {
+            packageStartupMessage("\nWarning:\nYou are running an old version of the R/alspac package.\n",
+                "This version:   ", current$Version, "\n",
+                "Latest version: ", latest, "\n",
+                "Please consider updating using remotes::install_github('explodecomputer/alspac')")
+        }
+    }
+
     loadDictionaries()
     
     tryCatch(setDataDir(), error=function(e) print(e$message))
 }
-
-
-