Ethical Issues in Testing and Test Development: What is the Role of the Pathologist? Matthew J. McQueen, M.B.,Ch.B.,Ph.D.,FRCPC,HonFRCPath. Professor, Pathology & Molecular Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON Canada 2 Veterinary ethics combines veterinary professional ethics and animal ethics, with the latter topic having a long history since the time of Aristotle1. The Veterinary Profession has its own guidelines for professional ethics and the American Veterinary Medical Association has a comprehensive series of Principles of Ethics2 The International Association of Veterinary Editors has published Consensus Author Guidelines on Animal Ethics and Welfare for Veterinary journals, updated in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2010. The stated goal of these guidelines is to ensure that all material published adheres to the highest ethical standards of animal welfare. Other countries have also issued guidelines, which include those dealing with the differentiation between animal research and veterinary treatment and the humane care and use of animals for scientific purposes (New South Wales, Australia, Animal Ethics Infolink) 3. This presentation will not discuss these areas since they have their own academic base and they are taught in veterinary schools. The expression of issues of ethics, autonomy, informed consent, beneficence, and truth-telling, as expressed in the veterinary profession have drawn upon the extensive research done in medicine. The professional relationship between physicians and their patients has essential similarities to that between veterinarians and their patients and clients. Beyond Professional Ethics. One goal of this presentation is to see how veterinary pathologists react to a criticism expressed some years ago that medical pathologists, clinical and histopathologists, had an almost exclusive concern with technical problems, at the expense of addressing the issues to which the technology could or should be applied 4. Only veterinarians can answer if that criticism has any validity today in veterinary pathology. The medical, moral and legal responsibility of the clinical physician was not in dispute but the Laboratory Medicine professionals, whether as physicians or doctoral level scientists, while having clear ideas about their professional ethics were less clear and challenging as to their clinical and public responsibility and could be seen as having followed a more passive and technical role. In opposition to following such a passive role it was argued that public trust in clinical and anatomical pathologist professionals was not only related to professional ethical standards but also to ethical responsibilities demonstrated in the pursuit of the public interest and the common good. Translating this into a veterinary context, the question could be asked, is the role of the veterinary clinical or anatomical pathologist one of selling services or is it a professional calling of providing service and, if the latter, can the line between professional identity and citizenship be easily or clearly drawn? Utilization of Laboratory Resources in Veterinary Care. Veterinary testing is largely unregulated compared with human medicine. Nevertheless, the clinical veterinary laboratory surely has a role in the responsible use 3 of finite resources by eliminating waste and acting to limit unnecessary testing. Alternatively, is there a passive response, as was the case in many clinical laboratories for many years, that if tests are requested by clinicians they are assumed to be useful and had to be provided, even when the clinical or anatomical pathologist’s professional expertise did not judge them to be useful. When test requests are too closely allied to increased revenue in a fee-for-service situation or to increased allocation of resources in a system receiving public funding, it seems to be the case that this issue takes a long time to be thoroughly addressed and debated? Great efforts have been devoted to proficiency testing and standardization in medical laboratories to improve quality, yet in spite of this problems remain and scandals have been uncovered. It may well be that there are no concerns about inequality of service arising from the quality of work in veterinary laboratories if the quality has already been demonstrated to be excellent. What would be less satisfactory would be that the lack of concern was due to a lack of evidence on which any sound judgment could be based. The call for evidence is a recurring theme in this paper. For a variety of technology driven reasons laboratory testing has faced two apparently contradictory pressures. One was to centralize and achieve economies of scale, yet at the same time due to advances in biosensors and microprocessors, the opposite process was to decentralize with point-of-care testing (POCT). This interesting use of language tends to restrict rational discussion. Promoters of POCT can readily portray any critic as showing a lack of caring. An alternative expression such as ‘point of need testing’ would have emphasized rationality and the need for evidence. The use of decentralized testing (POCT) should be guided by rationality, clinical need and cost effectiveness, not by politics, power or profit. The potential advantages of decentralized testing are clear since it may offer a faster turnaround time, more rapid clinical decisions, avoidance of identification and transportation problems and increased motivation of the individual performing the test. However, these theoretical advantages should be investigated and their presence verified when any POC test is provided. The veterinary clinical pathologist probably is the individual with the greatest understanding of tests and their uses and limitations in veterinary practice. There is surely an ethical and societal role to ensure that the client and the patient is being offered the most clinically appropriate and effective test at a fair cost. An alternative test that is not clinically superior should not be substituted simply because it is available as a POCT, usually costing at least three to four times more than a centralized test. If the client is told that the test is not superior and that getting it faster will make no clinical difference to the management or outcome of the patient, but is still willing to pay the extra cost for personal convenience then this is quite a different situation because the conditions of informed consent have been met. 4 Ethical and Design Challenges of Screening Programs and Screening Tests. In medical practice the clinical pathologists and the doctoral level clinical laboratory scientists, had a long history and experience of understanding laboratory testing that unfortunately had not been drawn upon to improve the quality of screening or testing programs. Only in the past 20 years have their voices been more clearly heard in these areas5. More recently the voice of the anatomical pathologist has also been heard in the area of test quality, addressing both the technical and interpretational components. Clinical pathologists in veterinary medicine surely are in the best position to understand the predictive value models for assessing test performance in their clinical practice, all the models being based on the fact that as the sensitivity of a test increases its specificity decreases and vice versa. It has been suggested that if the consequences of any test or procedure are uncertain it should be considered as research until its value and safety have been established.6 Under common law any human patient has the right to receive appropriate and understandable information in order to make a balanced judgment of risks and benefits of any medical intervention, including new and established screening programs. It would be hard to argue that the veterinary clinical pathologist, who is offering and then performing various tests, does not have a similar responsibility towards the client and the patient, particularly since any screening test is by definition being used in a pre-symptomatic patient. The veterinary clinical pathologist knows the analytical quality assurance of any screening test and when applying it clinically should have knowledge of its efficacy, effectiveness, availability and efficiency for the condition being screened. (Table 1). Similar to the medical clinical pathologist the veterinary clinical pathologist has a role in understanding and evaluating the post-analytical aspects of testing, the professional role is not limited to pre-analytical and analytical concerns. Clinical Efficacy Does it do more good than harm. Effectiveness Compliance in the asymptomatic population. Availability Appropriate and adequate resources so that It is readily available to many. Efficiency Appropriate and cost-effective use of resources. Table 1. Categories of Scientific Evidence for and Against Screening. The more abstract concepts embodied in the understanding of efficiency have also been expressed as six clinically relevant questions which can be used to determine how valid are various individual and multiphasic screening strategies (Table 2). The questions, which have been drawn from medical practice, may require modification to 5 be relevant to veterinary practice but there remains a need to meet the different design and organizational challenges for good studies that can answer these questions. 1. Can the screening maneuvers detect disease which is likely to have an important impact? 2. Will the treatment of risk factors have a major impact on the development of the disease? 3. How likely are participants to comply with treatment started as a result of the screening program? 4. Do existing screening programs alter the outcomes of the target disorder? 5. Do some of the methods used in evaluating the clinical effectiveness of screening programs lead to misleading conclusions? 6. Have we fully considered all the possible long term effects of the screening procedures, the negative effects of labeling people as having a disorder and the treatment started for those found to be positive? Table 2. Six clinical questions to determine the validity of individual and multiphase screening. History of Screening in Medical Practice. The history of screening in medical practice has provided many lessons. There were at least 10 screening trials of early detection of lung cancer from 1950 until the 1970’s that showed no decrease in disease-specific mortality. Currently there has been much publicity indicating that prostate cancer screening is challenged by evidence pointing to it having a much more limited role. One concern is that it has resulted in many unnecessary prostatectomies, with their accompanying side effects. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force concluded that PSA screening resulted in small to no reduction of mortality for prostate cancer7. Recommendations for the use of mammography in breast cancer screening have been strongly promoted for many years, with more recent data now being cited that indicate significantly less clinical value from this approach. The resulting changes in screening recommendations have left many women very confused and even angry. It is clear that professional enthusiasm to do good is by itself not sufficient. There is ample evidence that many screening procedures were experimental, at least in their early stages, and their strengths and weaknesses became apparent over time. Informed consent should be as rigorous for a screening procedure as it is expected to be for a clinical trial. The veterinary clinical pathologist has a role to play in assessing the value of screening and screening tests in veterinary practice and by doing so will retain the trust and confidence of the public. Such a strict interpretation of consent undoubtedly produces opposition and many will try to counter it by the suggestion that while all of the above may be true for tests that are potentially harmful, it is not necessary to get informed consent for ‘harmless’ tests such as screening for 6 increased cholesterol, or screening with other ‘routine’ tests which create no ethical concerns. Concern with such statements arises because they seem to reflect no social or ethical concerns about the costs of such testing, the absence of scientific evidence that such testing has any benefit, and the apparent assumption that this type of ‘screening’ has no adverse effects on the patient, whether human or animal. Of the adverse effects that may occur in humans those which are relevant to animals require the expert reflection, research and discussion of the veterinary profession, but adverse effects must be considered. In 2000 the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health published recommendations for the screening and treatment of hyperhomocysteinemia in the identification and management of coronary artery disease (CAD)8. They concluded from more than 30 retrospective case-control studies and eight prospective, nested case-control studies that there was an association but not a causal relationship between homocysteine and CAD risk. They recommended against screening, but this did not prevent clinical laboratories receiving many thousands of requests for this relatively expensive test. However, a study which had clinical pathology involvement, demonstrated in 2006 that although elevated homocysteine levels were significantly lowered with folic acid, Vitamin B6 and Vitamin B12, this did not prevent vascular disease events in high-risk patients.9 This conclusion was supported by other studies and it was this evidence that within months reduced the test requests to a very small number. The studies have not weakened the very strong association between hyperhomocysteinemia and vascular disease but they clearly demonstrated that the current therapy known to lower homocysteine levels did not produce any clinical benefit, so there was no need to screen for something for which there was no effective intervention. Quality health care in both veterinary and medical practice must be based on evidence to decide what is or is not appropriate. Evidence based evaluation requires a systematic approach which involves understanding the concepts of the diagnostic process, disease prevalence, ‘normality’, reference intervals, regression to the mean on repeat testing, positive and negative predictive values, the diagnostic accuracy of laboratory tests, clinical effectiveness and outcomes, together with the influence of study design on the interpretation of outcomes10. These are not areas of arcane knowledge restricted to epidemiologists and statisticians but are the tools of laboratory science for the veterinary clinical pathologist to apply in veterinary medicine. Appropriate Utilization of Laboratory Tests. It is not possible to deal with this in depth but the experience of laboratory medicine has been that the use of diagnostic resources has grown steadily and the population health status has not been improving at a similar rate. Test ordering does not seem to be influenced by the fact that in many cases the tests have poor diagnostic 7 accuracy. Testing may simply be repeated and a cascade of testing may follow. Guidelines and defensive behaviour produce more test requests11. There has been an enormous growth in the theoretical underpinnings of the evaluation of diagnostic procedures12, the challenge of communicating the accuracy of tests to general practitioners13, and moving beyond diagnostic accuracy to show how it can be linked to clinical utility14. Concerns about variations in the use of laboratory tests with no clear correlation with clinical outcomes, the excessive use or waste of laboratory resources and their contribution to annual health care costs, predicted to be $4 Trillion in the United States by the end of the decade,15 is driving many laboratory test utilization programs and stimulating the publication of many ‘how to do it’ papers. However, there are clear messages that the approach must be collaborative and inter-disciplinary and the laboratory professionals must be engaged. It is recognized that utilization management is in its early stages of development in the United States but the role of the clinical pathologist and laboratory director is seen to be essential16,17. This is a societal issue and while veterinary medicine may have some different issues, each with different emphasis, it seems improbable that it would be immune to the fiscal pressures coming from and being faced by the rest of society. For veterinary medicine the informed role of the veterinary pathologist will be critical in the response to these challenges. Will it be passive or professionally proactive?. The Veterinary Pathologist and Clinical Research Ethics. Outside our professional role we should care about clinical research ethics because we may be involved as a research subject, and as citizens we need to be aware that our prescription or our over-the-counter medicine may become part of a database used in post-marketing research. In a professional capacity a veterinary pathologist may be involved in a clinical trial or in the surveillance of side effects that may arise in a clinical study. In clinical medicine formal approval is required for clinical studies in many countries and national and international guidelines for good clinical practice must be followed. However, in spite of this ethical breaches can and do still occur. One example was in 1999 in a gene therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania in which Jesse Gelsinger18 who had a non-fatal genetic disorder was enrolled in that trial. He had hypersensitivity to the treatment, was not informed of changes in his liver function tests, he was re-challenged with the gene therapy vector and died. In spite of all the supposed safeguards relating to informed consent, information about deaths from liver injury in earlier animal studies had been withdrawn from the patient information. Incidentally, none of the preceding patients had shown significant gene delivery. The principal investigator held $13 million in equity in the biotechnology firm that supplied the viral vector and the host institution had a substantial 8 financial interest in the research. All of those factors were seen as areas of major concern, and the system had failed to safeguard that young man. Another example that clearly illustrates the complexity of the ethical challenges in the collection, generation, and interpretation of clinical research data, was illustrated by the history of the drug Rosiglitazone, which is used to control blood glucose 19. A metaanalysis of 42 studies of treatment with Rosiglitazone was published in 2007 which suggested an increased risk of myocardial infarction or cardiovascular death for those taking that medication. This meant that it took from 1999 when the drug was approved, until 2007 to indicate that there was no cardiovascular benefit from the treatment but apparently there was increased cardiovascular risk. The FDA decision to keep Avandia on the market in this situation produced outrage in the U.S. Senate in 2010 28. The issues of concern from 2007 until 2010 included the considerable delay in obtaining information about health outcomes, and although there were tens of millions of prescriptions for Rosiglitazone the FDA’s adverse event reporting system could not detect risk of events as common as coronary artery disease. From a clinical laboratory perspective there was an improvement in hemoglobin A1c, a surrogate endpoint and not a hard clinical endpoint, which had been automatically translated into improved patient health outcomes. There was also a lack of transparency in that the pharmaceutical company Glaxo Smith Kline conducted a study in 1999 that suggested Rosiglitazone might be less safe than a competing diabetes drug. These data were not provided to the FDA during the initial 1999 review, nor when the meta-analysis was reported in 2007. This was on a background of previous lack of transparency from the company with the drug Paxil in 2004. Between 2010 and 2011 the FDA restricted access to Rosiglitazone, it added cardiovascular risk, including myocardial infarction to the physician labelling and patient medication guide. However, in 2013 the adjudicated results of the study RECORD showed no elevated risk of myocardial infarction or death in patients treated with Rosiglitazone. The medication was then made available with indications for use that were similar to other diabetes drugs. For those of us in clinical pathology involved in clinical research, this whole story emphasizes the need to be knowledgeable about study design and it also made very clear that data evaluation is a very complex area. There are also significant limitations of meta-analysis. The strengths of the meta-analysis published in 2007 were that it included unpublished studies, that it used major cardiovascular events, namely myocardial infarction and cardiovascular death, as the primary outcome and did not rely on a laboratory test and surrogate marker. It also did the analysis by comparing Rosiglitazone with placebo. One major weakness of this meta-analysis was that only summary trial-level data, not data from individual patients, was available and so it was not possible to conduct time-to-event analyses or to evaluate the time course of risks. Eligible trials included both placebo and active-treatment control groups. Across the trials there was no standard method for identifying or validating the outcomes and so 9 events in eligible or ineligible trials may have been missed or misclassified. The total number of events was very small with only 158 myocardial infarctions and 61 cardiovascular deaths. This meant that statistically there was little or no power to detect potential differences among the trials if those differences were indeed present. The result of inadequate power is that findings may be due to chance since a few events either way might change conclusions. The later re-adjudication of the RECORD trial illustrated that these were real weaknesses in the meta-analysis21. The last example I want to give illustrates that even in the apparently highly regulated world of human medical research major scandals can occur. In 2009 a German anaesthetist, J. Boldt, published a paper related to cardiopulmonary bypass priming using a high dose of a balanced hydroxyethyl starch versus an albumin-based primary strategy. It was published in the Journal of Anesthesia and Analgesia and over four weeks three readers questioned the “perfect” data. The Journal Editor then requested investigation by the Ethics Committee for the German State of RheinlandPfalz, and it was found that there had been no Ethics Committee approval, there was no evidence of written informed consent, and no prospective randomization in the study. Investigation by the hospital and the State Medical Association then found no original patient or laboratory data for the study. In fact albumin had not been used as a priming solution since 1999 and the study was published in 2009. Boldt then admitted to forging the signatures of co-authors, and in August, 2012, an extensive investigation concluded that for 91 of his publications which they had studied, most had no evidence of ethical approval and there was no, or incomplete, study documentation. Subsequently 16 medical journals retracted 89 of Boldt’s articles. The clear messages here for all veterinary and medical pathologists involved in clinical research are that despite guidelines and committees fraud can still occur. There is an ethical obligation to ensure that there are tightened procedures, that there is oversight to monitor such clinical studies, and pathologist researchers must play their part in ensuring that quality standards are maintained. Furthermore, all authors must sign that they have seen the original data and the authors must name the Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board that approved the study. Improving the Reporting of Test Accuracy Studies. In 2003 a group of medical clinical pathologists and laboratory scientists produced the STARD statement which included a 25 item checklist to facilitate the complete and transparent reporting of studies of the accuracy of medical tests. As all laboratory specialists know these tests are key elements in many research studies and publications22. The guiding principle in the development of the checklist was the selection of items which would help readers of journal papers to find study results, judge the potential for bias in the study and appraise the applicability of the study findings. It was adopted by more than 120 journals, although it has to be admitted that there are 10 variations in the extent that they recommend the use of the guidelines and their use of the checklist. However, it has resulted in a significant improvement in reporting of test accuracy studies. There is now a process underway involving the medical and clinical pathologists and laboratory scientists to update the statement based on the experience of using it for the past ten years. Apart from trying to make it easier to use by authors of research publications, much more has become known in the past ten years about sources of bias, sources of funding, sample size calculations, the use of optimistic titles, rosy conclusions in the abstract and selective reporting of results. There is also a move to make the language consistent with that used in clinical guidelines, and to promote the idea that there should be a publicly available registry for all test accuracy studies, just as has been advocated for all clinical trials. All of these issues may seem remote to many veterinary pathologists but all pathologists must be able to critically read papers and appraise the applicability of the study findings in order to maintain their professional competence. Bias in Research and Its Effect on Clinical Practice. In the last ten years the number of publications in life sciences has increased 44%, and it appears that 80% of research publications attract no attention. It is important to know something about the quality of the remaining 20% and the influence of bias on those publications. Two studies indicated that 75% to 89% of pre-clinical research studies, predominantly oncology related and published in top-tier journals could not be reproduced23,24. There is an increasing incidence of published studies that cannot be replicated and there is also an increasing incidence of corrections or retractions. Some 235 forms of bias have been identified, clustered and mapped to Biomedical Research Fields25. It has been shown that studies with favourable results rather than negative or disappointing ones are more likely to be published. This is true also for test accuracy studies, even those registered in ClinicalTrials.gov.26 Conclusion. There are many ethical issues relevant to testing and test development, and the veterinary pathologist has an active and important professional and ethical responsibility in those areas. If studies are not designed and conducted properly there is an unnecessary duplication of research efforts. When studies with more favourable results are more likely to be published then this has a profound effect on the evidence-base for clinical decisions since the profession is being presented with a skewed synthesis of evidence. All of this produces biased estimates of the effectiveness of interventions and results in unnecessary exposure of our patients to ineffective or harmful interventions. As pathologists we must pursue the highest professional ethical standards. 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