Factors Considered by Interprofessional Team for Treatment Decision in Hip Fracture with Dementia.

Objectives: Patients with dementia are at high risk for hip fractures and often have poor outcomes when a fracture is sustained. Despite this poor prognosis, little data are available on what factors should be prioritized to guide surgical decision making in these cases. We aimed to understand the decision-making process for older dementia patients hospitalized after hip fractures.

Challenges to effective research in acute trauma resuscitation: consent and endpoints.

Selection of study endpoints is one of the most important decisions in the design of effective clinical trials. Late mortality (e.g.

Ethical issues in conducting migrant farmworker studies.

Migrant farmworkers should be considered a vulnerable population because they work in a hazardous industry, are often members of an ethnic minority, have known difficulty in accessing health care, and are often of lower socioeconomic status. For these reasons, too, it is extremely important to conduct health-related research with this often-underserved group. However, because migrant farmworkers are vulnerable, investigators must be especially vigilant in protecting them from the potential harms of research and in ensuring that the special ethical issues that arise in research with this population are identified and addressed for every project.

Waiver of consent in studies of acute brain injury.

A multicenter trial of hypothermia in patients with acute brain injury, designed to accrue 140 patients per year and randomizing in less than 6 h from injury, enrolled 392 patients. The design was to achieve 33 degrees C within 8 h after injury. For the first 9 months of the trial, the only consent mechanism permitted by federal regulations was prospective, informed consent.