The Ethics Blog

A blog from the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)

Month: November 2023

How do we find out if drugs are safe for groups excluded from clinical trials?

Breastfeeding mother and baby, photo by Monica Turlui
28 November, 2023 / / 1 Comment

Drug development requires that the drug is tested on patients in clinical trials. Not only the drug’s effectiveness is tested on the patients, but also its safety. Does the drug have serious side effects and what dosage is safe? Thanks to such clinical research, approved drugs can be provided with safety information, which enables doctors and patients to make informed decisions about drug treatment.

However, there are vulnerable groups that are often excluded from clinical studies, such as pregnant and breastfeeding women. But this protection of a vulnerable group can make the group extra vulnerable when deciding on drug treatment. If there is no evidence, it is not known whether the medicine the woman needs risks harming her, the fetus or the child being breastfed. It is also not known what dosage should be recommended. Perhaps the woman herself refrains from taking a medicine she needs, or receives advice from the doctor to refrain from it. Not because one knows that the medicine poses risks for the group, but because one does not know.

Are there other ways to obtain evidence on medicine safety for pregnant and breastfeeding women, besides clinical studies? Yes, there are, because pregnant and breastfeeding women must of course often use medication. Several registers already contain data from women who use medicines during pregnancy. In addition, pregnant and breastfeeding women using medicines may be engaged in additional data collection activities. Thus, there is already data as well as additional opportunities to collect data, without involving the group in clinical studies.

Josepine Fernow describes in Uppsala Reports such an attempt to compile existing data and expand the possibilities of collecting new data: the European project IMI ConcePTION. This project is developing several different paths towards better future safety information about drug treatment during pregnancy and breastfeeding. One challenge is to develop a technical infrastructure where data collected in different registers and in different formats are harmonized so that they can be collected and handled in standardized ways. Another challenge is to enable pregnant women to easily report relevant data about their medication use, for example via a mobile application. The project also tries to produce new data on breastfeeding and medicine use. For example, milk is collected and analyzed from breastfeeding women who use various medicines, in order to understand and predict how these medicines are transferred to the breast milk and in what concentration. Two of these breastfeeding studies are underway in Sweden. They are coordinated by CRB and we will write about them on this blog.

ConcePTION is also developing a knowledge bank that will be available online from the end of 2024, which will make the data and knowledge generated by the project useful. There are thus several avenues for research along which one can generate evidence for better safety information about various medicines for pregnant and breastfeeding women, without involving the group in clinical studies.

Read Josepine Fernow’s description of the project here: Making medicines safer for pregnant and breastfeeding women. There you will also find several links to the project and to the project’s publications.

Pär Segerdahl

Written by…

Pär Segerdahl, Associate Professor at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics and editor of the Ethics Blog.

This post in Swedish

Part of international collaborations

How should coercive care be regulated within somatic healthcare?

21 November, 2023 / / 1 Comment

Coercive measures against patients are regularly used in healthcare outside of psychiatry, for example in neurosurgical care. Examples of such measures are belting, boxing gloves, holding patients down, forced medication and hidden medication. It is mostly nurses who carry out these coercive measures. The most common motive for forcing patients is to protect them from harming themselves or others: patients may be confused or aggressive and try to pull out vital ports for intravenous drug administration or abuse staff, often without understanding what they are doing themselves. Because the staff act in a legal and moral gray zone, they often feel moral stress exercising coercion.

How can we regulate coercive care in a way that balances ethically relevant considerations about the measures, so that staff no longer have to act in a gray zone?

Different countries have chosen different paths to regulate coercive care within somatic healthcare. In Sweden, it is in principle illegal to use all forms of coercion without the support of compulsory psychiatric care. An overarching problem in the regulation of coercive care is to ensure that patients with reduced decision-making capacity receive the care they need and at the same time ensure that patients with a sufficient degree of decision-making capacity are not forced into care they do not want. In an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Amina Guenna Holmgren and I and two co-authors try to sort out these difficulties. Arguments about justice, trust in healthcare, minimizing harm and respect for autonomy are made for and against different national regulations. We conclude that a regulation that includes an assessment of the patients’ decision-making capacity and takes the patient’s best interests into account is preferable, in contrast to regulations based on psychiatric diagnoses or regulations where there are no legal possibilities to practice coercive care at all within somatic care.

If you want to take a closer look at our reasoning regarding the regulation of restraint in somatic healthcare and evaluate our proposal, you will find the article here: Restraint in somatic healthcare: how should it be regulated?

Niklas Juth

Written by…

Niklas Juth, Professor of Clinical Medical Ethics at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)

Guenna Holmgren A, von Vogelsang A, Lindblad A, Niklas Juth. Restraint in somatic healthcare: how should it be regulated? Journal of Medical Ethics. Published Online First: 18 October 2023. doi: 10.1136/jme-2023-109240

This post in Swedish

Thinking about law

Neuroethics: don’t let the name fool you

Brain growing out of a tree, illustration by Gugacurado on Pixabay
14 November, 2023 / / 1 Comment

Names easily give the impression that the named is something separate and autonomous: something to which you can attach a label. If you want to launch something and get attention – “here is something completely new to reckon with” – it is therefore a good idea to immediately create a new name that spreads the image of something very special.

Despite this, names usually lag behind what they designate. The named has already taken shape, without anyone noticing it as anything special. In the freedom from a distinctive designation, roots have had time to spread and branches to stretch far. Since everything that is given freedom to grow is not separate and autonomous, but rooted, interwoven and in exchange with its surroundings, humans eventually notice it as something interesting and therefore give it a special name. New names can thus give a misleading image of the named as newer and more separate and autonomous than it actually is. When the name arrives, almost everything is already prepared in the surroundings.

In an open peer commentary in the journal AJOB Neuroscience, Kathinka Evers, Manuel Guerrero and Michele Farisco develop a similar line of reasoning about neuroethics. They comment on an article published in the same issue that presents neuroethics as a new field only 15 years old. The authors of the article are concerned by the still unfinished and isolated nature of the field and therefore launch a vision of a “translational neuroethics,” which should resemble that tree that has had time to grow together with its surroundings. In the vision, the new version of neuroethics is thus described as integrated, inclusive and impactful.

In their commentary, Kathinka Evers and co-authors emphasize that it is only the label “neuroethics” that has existed for 15 years. The kind of questions that neuroethics works with were already dealt with in the 20th century in applied ethics and bioethics, and some of the conceptual problems have been discussed in philosophy since antiquity. Furthermore, ethics committees have dealt with neuroethical issues long before the label existed. Viewed in this way, neuroethics is not a new and separate field, but rather a long-integrated and cooperating sub-discipline to neuroscience, philosophy and bioethics – depending on which surroundings we choose to emphasize.

Secondly, the commentators point out, the three characteristics of a “translational neuroethics” – integration, inclusiveness and impact – are a prerequisite for something to be considered a scientific field. An isolated field that does not include knowledge and perspectives from surrounding sciences and areas of interest, and that lacks practical impact, is hardly what we see today as a research field. The three characteristics are therefore not entirely successful as a vision of a future development of neuroethics. If the field is to deserve its name at all, the characteristics must already permeate neuroethics. Do they do that?

Yes, say the commentators if I understand them correctly. But in order to see this we must not be deceived by the distinctive designation, which gives the image of something new, separate and autonomous. We must see that work on neuroethical issues has been going on for a long time in several different philosophical and scientific contexts. Already when the field got its distinctive name, it was integrated, inclusive and impactful, not least within the academically established discipline of bioethics. Some problematic tendencies toward isolation have indeed existed, but they were related to the distinctive label, as it was sometimes used by isolated groups to present their activities as something new and special to be reckoned with.

The open commentary is summarized by the remark that we should avoid the temptation to see neuroethics as a completely new, autonomous and separate discipline: the temptation that the name contributes to. Such an image makes us myopic, the commentators write, which paradoxically can make it more difficult to support the three objectives of the vision. It is both truer and more fruitful to consider neuroethics and bioethics as distinct but not separate fields. If this is true, we do not need to launch an even newer version of neuroethics under an even newer label.

Read the open commentary here: Neuroethics & bioethics: distinct but not separate. If you want to read the article that is commented on, you will find the reference at the bottom of this post.

Pär Segerdahl

Written by…

Pär Segerdahl, Associate Professor at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics and editor of the Ethics Blog.

K. Evers, M. Guerrero & M. Farisco (2023) Neuroethics & Bioethics: Distinct but Not Separate, AJOB Neuroscience, 14:4, 414-416, DOI: 10.1080/21507740.2023.2257162

Anna Wexler & Laura Specker Sullivan (2023) Translational Neuroethics: A Vision for a More Integrated, Inclusive, and Impactful Field, AJOB Neuroscience, 14:4, 388-399, DOI: 10.1080/21507740.2021.2001078

This post in Swedish

Minding our language