Adherence to ethical principles is essential nowadays in neurology and neuroscience research. Although there are certain generally valid ethical principles for all medical domains, stated and regularly updated in works such as the Declaration of Helsinki or Beauchamp and Childresss book Principles of Biomedical Ethics, the complexity of neurology leads to particular ethical issues that both the clinician and the researcher may face.
While there are many ethical controversies, this article aims to explore four important topics: ethical dilemmas in neurodegenerative diseases with focus on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, particularities in neuroscience research on human subject, informed consent, and ethics in vascular neurology with emphasis on stroke.
We searched Pubmed, Science Direct, and Google Scholar during March and April 2020. We retrieved the articles published during the last 10 years, screened them, and selected the most relevant.
We have shown that neurodegenerative pathologies pose a lot of potential ethical problems, beginning with the planning of a new clinical trial. Violations of ethical norms take place in both bedside medicine and clinical research, as nowadays neurologists are increasingly under the pressure of capitalist society. Informed consent is the third topic addressed, with focus on particular aspects of decision-making capacity in neurological patients. At last, ethical issues in vascular neurology are presented, an intensively studied neurology subdomain with numerous improvements in recent years that still raises countless ethical issues.
Key words: bioethics, neurology, research on human subject, informed consent, stroke
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