October 20, 2013

Medical Research Ethics

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There’s a new edition of the Declaration of Helsinki, the research ethics declaration of the World Medical Association (diffs from the previous version)

Some of the main changes

  • Clarification of the principles for research on vulnerable populations, such as developing countries: the question should be relevant to them so that the answer provides benefits to them, and there should be a fair level of other benefits.
  • Explicit recognition that risks need to be monitored during the research
  • Requiring some way for the treatment identified as best to be available to research participants after a trial
  • Adding research sponsors (eg, drug companies) to the list of those with explicit obligations to ensure publication of all results.

(via Alice Dreger and Janet Stemwedel)

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »