Press releases Monday 25 January to Friday 29 January 2010

Please remember to credit the BMJas source when publicising an article and to tell your readers that they can read its full text on the journal's website (http://www.bmj.com).

(1) No role for mental health professionals in the practice of torture
(2) New guidance on data sharing will minimise risks to patient privacy

(1) No role for mental health professionals in the practice of torture
(Analysis: Interrogating the role of mental health professionals in assessing torture )
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/doi/10.1136/bmj.c124

Psychologists and psychiatrists should not be expected to participate in torture as they do not have the expertise to assess individual pain or the long-term effects of interrogation, says an expert on bmj.com today.

The authors, Derrick Silove and Susan Rees, from the University of New South Wales in Australia, say some senior members of the US military have argued that a psychologist’s presence is necessary to protect the prisoner or detainee from the "severe physical or mental pain or suffering resulting in prolonged mental harm."

They add that several leading scientific journals have also published papers by authors who support the presence of mental health professionals as protection for detainees.

But the authors believe that there is no established marker to assess "xtreme experiences that cause pain or psychological trauma" and do not believe it is possible for professionals "to make accurate assessments of the level of pain or mental trauma being experienced by the detainee."

They maintain that it can be "notoriously difficult" to assess how much distress a detainee is experiencing. Indeed, there is evidence that "militants who are ideologically prepared may show greater resilience when tortured."

There is extensive research, they argue, that torture causes long-term mental health problems. However, "we do not yet have the scientific knowledge to predict with any precision what the psychological outcome will be for an individual."

The authors conclude that having spent years trying to reveal the damaging effects of torture, it would be ironic if health professionals were called upon to use their skills to participate in this practice.

Contact:

Derrick Silove, Professor of Psychiatry, School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales, Australia
Email: d.silove@unsw.edu.au

New guidance published on bmj.com this week sets out how personal information from clinical trials should be shared to help minimise risks to patient privacy.

Many peer reviewed journals now require authors to be prepared to share their raw, unprocessed data with other scientists or state the availability of raw data in published articles, but there has been little guidance on how such data should be prepared for sharing.

So Iain Hrynaszkiewicz and colleagues offer practical advice for anonymising (or de- identifying) data to ensure patient privacy when sharing clinical research.

They advise researchers to seek informed consent about data sharing from patients involved in clinical trials before studies begin.

They list 28 items of personal and clinical information that can make patients identifiable in anonymised datasets, and recommend that, unless patients have explicitly consented, all direct identifiers such as names should be removed from datasets.

And if three or more indirect identifiers such as age and sex are given about any patient, the researchers should ask an independent expert or an ethics committee to assess the risk of breaking confidentiality before sharing the data.

They also recommend that researchers should make explicit statements in research articles that have linked raw data, about patients' consent to the sharing of those data.

This, say the authors, should be the minimum standard for ensuring that participants’ privacy is not put at unnecessary risk.

In an accompanying editorial, Trish Groves, BMJ deputy editor, says the BMJ is now adopting some of these recommendations. For example, the BMJ strongly supports the view that researchers should seek informed consent to data sharing from research participants up front, at the recruitment stage. The journal will also expand its advice to authors about data sharing, and will extend its data sharing statements to include explicit information about consent.

Contact:

Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Managing Editor, BioMed Central Ltd, London, UK
Email iain.hrynaszkiewicz@biomedcentral.com

FOR ACCREDITED JOURNALISTS

For more information please contact:

Emma Dickinson
Tel: +44 (0)20 7383 6529
Email: edickinson@bma.org.uk

Press Office telephone : 020 7383 6254 (Weekdays : 0900hrs - 1800hrs)
British Medical Association
BMA House, Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9JP

and from:

the EurekAlert website, run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (http://www.eurekalert.org)
[[$FOOTER]] http://intranet.bmj.com/departments/dept-bmj/bmj-team-resources/web-team-resources/General_blogging_principles.doc