Guest Post by Caitlin Cole
Incidental findings in brain imaging research are common. Investigators can discover these unexpected findings of potential medical significance in up to 70% of their research scans. However, there are no standards to guide investigators as to whether they should actively search for these findings or which, if any, they should return to research participants.
This complex ethical issue impacts many groups in brain imaging: participants and parents of child participants who may desire relevant health information, but alternatively may suffer from anxiety and financial burden; investigators who must ethically grant their participants autonomy, but who also may suffer from budget and personnel restrictions to manage the review and report of these findings; Institutional Review Board (IRB) members who must provide ethical oversight to imaging research and help mandate institutional standards; and health providers who must interface with their patients and assist with follow up care when necessary.
Our research study shows these groups share some ideas on the ethics of returning incidental findings – “the researcher has an ethical responsibility or obligation to tell a subject that there’s something there, however they do it, but just inform the subject, even though it’s not part of the research” – yet also acknowledge the inherent risk in reporting medical research information. As one of our IRB members commented, “I mean [in regards to withholding findings] one reason would be to protect the patient from doing something stupid about them.”
When participants are asked about incidental findings, they consistently state that they want to receive all information pertinent to their health. Research participants want to make their own medical decisions and feel investigators have a responsibility to keep them informed.
However, it is clear from our research that participants do not always understand the difference between a brain scan for research purposes and a clinical scan. The incidental finding reports that they receive include personal health information, written in medical jargon, discovered during a clinical procedure that may have immediate or long term medical significance. Because of this crossover between conducting research and sharing health information, participants may overestimate the clinical utility of the reported research information. This is a challenge for investigators whose role is to conduct research, not to diagnose participants or offer findings with clinical certainty. Participant assumptions otherwise have the potential to cause downstream legal complications for the research institution.
It is necessary to understand the impact on all parties involved in the process of disclosing incidental findings to determine appropriate management policy. This challenging task should not be underestimated as these groups think differently about the balance between risk and benefit based on their role in this process, whether they be a research participant, a research investigator, an IRB member or a health provider. Overall there is an ethical demand to manage and report unexpected findings discovered in brain imaging research; finding a way to do this while minimizing negative impact for all involved is important.
Read the full paper here.