Emails and other documents recently obtained by ProPublica Illinois have prompted fresh criticism of a famous pediatric psychiatrist whose work violated research rules and put children’s health at risk. University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) researcher Mani Pavuluri, founder of a clinic to treat children with bipolar disorder, had enrolled her own sons as healthy controls in a clinical study of the therapeutic effects of lithium, ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education report today (July 3).
There are ethical concerns about parents working with their own children in this way, “particularly [in] research that might be quite stressful for a child,” Michael Carome, a former senior official at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Human Research Protections, tells ProPublica. “At a minimum, the researcher should not have done that without seeking approval from the [university’s institutional review board].”
Pavuluri’s study began in 2009 to ...
