Neuroimaging research with children: ethical issues and case scenarios

Abstract

There are few available resources for learning and teaching about ethical issues in neuroimaging research with children, who constitute a special and vulnerable population. Here, a brief review of ethical issues in developmental research, situated within the emerging field of neuroethics, highlights the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research with children. Traditional boundaries between behavioural, psychological, neuroscientific and educational research are being blurred by multidisciplinary studies of learning and human development. Developmental and educational researchers need to be aware of the ethical quandaries inherent in such research, and moral educators need to encourage researchers to consider the ethical aspects of developmental neuroimaging. To this end, fictional case scenarios were designed to address two topics in the ethical conduct of neuroimaging research with children: inadvertent findings in paediatric neuroimaging and inclusion of young children in pharmacological clinical trials. The latter is contrasted with an educational trial in an alternate scenario, underscoring similarities in ethical issues across types of developmental research. It is hoped that discussions elicited by such scenarios will contribute to both moral education and paediatric neuroethics.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Aine Donovan and Ronald M. Green of the Dartmouth College Ethics Institute for organizing the Ethics Across the Curriculum Faculty Seminar (2004–2005), which provided a forum for beginning to think about the ideas expressed herein, and the seminar participants, who provided interesting and engaging conversation. Thanks are also due to Andrew Garrod for helpful comments on a previous draft, and to two anonymous JME reviewers for their insightful comments.

The lengthy quote on page 9 is reprinted from Brain and Cognition, 50, Illes, J., Desmond, J. E., Huang, L. F., Raffin, T. A., & Atlas, S. W., (2002) Ethical and practical considerations in managing incidental findings in functional magnetic resonance imaging, with kind permission of Elsevier.

Revision of the manuscript was in part supported by an NSF Science of Learning Center Grant supporting the creation of the Center for Cognitive and Educational Neuroscience (CCEN) at Dartmouth College (SBE‐0354400, Michael Gazzaniga, PI).

Notes

1. Although a number of resources for accessing established case studies that illustrate ethical issues in research are available, most of these appear to focus on traditional issues such as data manipulation or conflicts of interest that are not specific to neuroimaging research with children.

2. I am grateful to an anonymous JME reviewer for these ideas and expressions.

3. While not central to the issue at hand, it is important to note that, in addition to fair distribution of subject selection across ages, there is the issue of the fair distribution of selection within the population of minors. Here, there are crucial concerns involving socioeconomic status (SES), education, access, incentives, coercion, the rights of parents and the vulnerability of children. Interestingly, neuroimaging studies have begun to investigate correlations between SES and brain development while noting the ethical aspects of this research (e.g. Farah, Noble & Hurt, 2006).