Laura Chouette on Unsplash This study aims to measure the mental, educational and physiological effects of sleep deprivation on adolescents and means of alleviating those effects. Participants are aged 13–18, and will spend 15 days sequestered in a study facility under the supervision of the study team. They may be in contact with parents and others via telephone and internet, but leaving the premises will constitute withdrawal from the study. Participants will be randomly assigned either a normal sleep regimen or a sleep-deprived regimen. Throughout the day and night, they will wear a movement-sensitive wristband to measure physical activity and sleep patterns. On 4 nights, sleep will be monitored via electrodes placed on their body. During the day, participants will be given regular meals (food other than that provided by researchers is not permitted), attend science education activities and undergo a battery of psychological tests intended to measure the effects […]

A professor is interested in the extent to which students’ medical issues affect their academic ability. He wants to recruit students at his college to fill in a questionnaire concerning any major health issues they have had in the past year, including dates and purpose of non-routine visits to the college’s health services. He also will ask for their permission to access their academic records from the same period, in order to measure whether there is a strong causal relationship between certain health issues and how well a student does in class. He will use the findings to generate recommendations concerning how professors may want to be sensitive in teaching and assessing students with those health issues highly correlated with poor performance. The researcher requests of his IRB a waiver of the requirement for consent. While the study uses identifiable health information, the researcher argues that the study is observational […]

A researcher wishes to conduct a retrospective observational study on the health records of patients at a particular hospital who recently underwent a cardiovascular surgery in the past year. The researcher would be looking for correlations between long-term complications arising from the surgery and an array of risk factors indicated in the patients’ charts – weight, smoking habits, reported exercise, hypertension levels, etc. – with the goal of using the results to tailor follow-up care based on personalized risk factors. The records of all 822 patients who underwent cardiovascular surgery at that hospital in the past year would be accessed in the course of the study. The researcher requests a waiver of consent from her IRB, on the grounds that the risk is minimal (data will be kept secure within the hospital’s servers) and the study would be impracticable without the waiver (It may be difficult to contact all 822 […]

Kurt is a teacher in Germany. He has been asked to join a large research project that is looking at the genetics of cardiovascular disease. This will involve giving a DNA sample, answering a questionnaire and allowing details of his treatment to be given to the researchers. This study will directly help clinicians decide which drug to give to those patients who are enrolled in the study. Researchers at the local hospital where Kurt is being treated, in collaboration with a team of researchers from a European university and a medical sciences institute in China, are conducting the study.   Kurt has been asked to give a broad consent that will allow the researchers to keep the DNA sample and information for use in suitably approved future research projects. This will save them the expense of coming back for consent for each new research project. He can choose whether researchers […]