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The proposal of the new criteria for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) based on biomarker data is making possible a diagnosis of AD at the mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or predementia/prodromal– stag...
Compensation for research related injuries is a subject that is increasingly gaining traction in developing countries which are burgeoning destinations of multi center research. However, the existence of dispa...
The allocation of any scarce health care resource, especially a lifesaving resource, can create profound ethical and legal challenges. Liver transplant allocation currently is based upon urgency, a sickest-fir...
A review of literature published a decade ago noted a significant increase in empirical papers across nine bioethics journals. This study provides an update on the presence of empirical papers in the same nine...
The participation of vulnerable patients in clinical research poses apparent ethical dilemmas. Depending on the nature of the vulnerability, their participation may challenge the ethical principles of autonomy...
Fake news and alternative facts have become commonplace in these so-called “post-factual times.” What about medical research - are scientific facts fake as well? Many recent disclosures have fueled the claim t...
Respect for autonomy is a key principle in bioethics. However, respecting autonomy in practice is complex because most people define themselves and make decisions influenced by a complex network of social rela...
In many countries, there are health care initiatives to make smokers give up smoking in the peri-operative setting. There is empirical evidence that this may improve some, but not all, operative outcomes. Howe...
Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) is an umbrella term covering several conditions for which alcohol consumption during pregnancy is taken to play a causal role. The benefit of individuals being identifie...
Issues of balancing data accessibility with ethical considerations and governance of a genomics research biobank, Generation Scotland, are explored within the evolving policy landscape of the past ten years. D...
The use of empirical research methods in bioethics has been increasing in the last decades. It has resulted in discussions about the ‘empirical turn of bioethics’ and raised questions related to the value of e...
For valid informed consent, it is crucial that patients or research participants fully understand all that their consent entails. Testing and revising informed consent documents with the assistance of their ad...
As part of its response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in west Africa, the United Kingdom (UK) government established an Ebola treatment unit in Sierra Leone, staffed by military personnel. Little is known about t...
Community engagement (CE) models have provided much needed guidance for researchers to conceptualise and design engagement strategies for research projects. Most of the published strategies, however, still sho...
Hospital-dependent patients are individuals who are repeatedly readmitted to the hospital because their acute medical needs cannot be met elsewhere. Unlike the chronically critically ill, these patients do not...
The world literature shows that empirical research regarding the process of decision-making when cancer in adolescents is no longer curable has been conducted in High-income, English speaking countries. The ob...
As the practice of medicine inevitably raises both ethical and legal issues, it had been recommended since 1999 that medical ethics and human rights be taught at every medical school. Most Nigerian medical sch...
The scarcity of human organs requires the transplant community to make difficult allocation decisions. This process begins at individual medical centers, where transplant teams decide which patients to place o...
Care-dependency constitutes an important issue with regard to the approval of end-of-life decisions, yet attitudes towards assisted suicide and euthanasia are understudied among care-dependent older adults. We...
Social media and Internet technologies present several emerging and ill-explored issues for a modern healthcare workforce. One issue is patient-targeted Googling (PTG), which involves a healthcare professional...
Treatment informed consent aims to preserve the autonomy of patients in the clinician – patient relationship so as to ensure valid consent. An acceptable method of evaluating understanding of consent informati...
Fair prioritization of healthcare resources has been on the agenda for decades, but resource allocation dilemmas in clinical practice remain challenging. Can clinical ethics committees (CECs) be of help? The a...
Ensuring adequate informed consent for surgery in a trauma setting is challenging. We developed and pilot tested an educational video containing information regarding the informed consent process for surgery i...
The use of tissue collected at a forensic post-mortem for forensic genetics research purposes remains of ethical concern as the process involves obtaining informed consent from grieving family members. Two for...
The review of human participant research by Research Ethics Committees (RECs) or Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) is a complex multi-faceted process that cannot be reduced to an algorithm. However, this does...
The legitimacy of conscientious objection to abortion continues to fuel heated debate in Italy. In two recent decisions, the European Committee for Social Rights underlined that conscientious objection places ...
As part of the preparations to establish a population-based biobank in a large Israeli health organization, we aimed to investigate through focus groups the knowledge, perceptions and attitudes of insured Isra...
The relationships between age and the life-supporting treatments use, and between gender and the life-supporting treatments use are still controversial. Using extracorporeal membrane oxygenation as an example ...
Starting dialysis at an advanced age is a clinical challenge and an ethical dilemma. The advantages of starting dialysis at “extreme” ages are questionable as high dialysis-related morbidity induces a reflecti...
Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a set of technologies that are of increasing interest to researchers. BCI has been proposed as assistive technology for individuals who are non-communicative or paralyzed, suc...
Mobile applications and socio-sexual networking websites are used by outreach workers to respond synchronously to questions and provide information, resources, and referrals on sexual health and STI/HIV preven...
In February, 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the ban on medical assistance in dying (MAiD). In June, 2016, the federal government passed Bill C-14, permitting MAiD. Current medical students will ...
Protecting human subjects from being exploited is one of the main ethical challenges for clinical research. However, there is also a responsibility to protect and respect the communities who are hosting the re...
New technologies facilitate the enhancement of a wide range of human dispositions, capacities, or abilities. While it is argued that we need to set limits to human enhancement, it is unclear where we should fi...
Health checks identify (risk factors for) disease in people without symptoms. They may be offered by the government through population screenings and by other providers to individual users as ‘personal health ...
The doctor-patient relationship is a crucial aspect of primary-care practice Research on associations between quality of care provision and burnout and empathy in a primary care setting could improve this rela...
Research into personal health data holds great potential not only for improved treatment but also for economic growth. In these years many countries are developing policies aimed at facilitating such research ...
The Correspondence to this article has been published in BMC Medical Ethics 2019 20:6
The original article was published in BMC Medical Ethics 2017 18:48
The increased use of information technology in every day health care creates vast amounts of stored health data that can be used for research. The secondary research use of routinely collected data raises ques...
The informed-consent process should be one of meaningful information exchange between researchers and study participants. One of the responsibilities of research ethics committees is to oversee appropriate inf...
Medical schools have a major impact on future doctors’ ethics and their attitudes towards cooperation with the pharmaceutical industry. From childhood, medical students who are related to a physician are expos...
The Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) is an interdisciplinary protocol, aiming to ensure that dying patients receive dignified and individualized treatment and care at the end-of-life. LCP was originally developed ...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Medical Ethics 2017 18:52
This paper proposes a refocusing of consent for clinical genetic testing, moving away from an emphasis on autonomy and information provision, towards an emphasis on the virtues of healthcare professionals seek...
Carrier screening is generally performed with the aim of identifying healthy couples at risk of having a child affected with a monogenic disorder to provide them with reproductive options. Expanded carrier scr...
The original article was published in BMC Medical Ethics 2017 18:43
The conduct of research in settings affected by disasters such as hurricanes, floods and earthquakes is challenging, particularly when infrastructures and resources were already limited pre-disaster. However, ...
Between 2013 and 2016, West Africa experienced the largest ever outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease. In the absence of registered treatments or vaccines to control this lethal disease, the World Health Organizatio...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Medical Ethics 2017 18:45
Ethical issues related to comparative effectiveness research, or research that compares existing standards of care, have recently received considerable attention. In this paper we focus on how Ethics Review Commi...
There is currently no consensus from the relevant stakeholders regarding the operational and construct definitions of child assent for research. As such, the requirements for assent are often construed in diff...
This paper joins the debate over changes in the role of health professionals when applying advance directives to manage the decision-making process at the end of life care. Issues in relation to advance direct...
Citation Impact 2023
Journal Impact Factor: 3.0
5-year Journal Impact Factor: 3.1
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP): 1.384
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR): 0.975
Speed 2023
Submission to first editorial decision (median days): 12
Submission to acceptance (median days): 200
Usage 2023
Downloads: 1,830,857
Altmetric mentions: 1,282
The following summary describes the peer review process for this journal:
Identity transparency: Single anonymized
Reviewer interacts with: Editor
Review information published: Review reports. Reviewer Identities reviewer opt in. Author/reviewer communication