Hello friends, I want to design my study on anthracosis, a chronic lung disease characterized by the deposit of coal dust in the lungs and by the formation of black nodules on the bronchioles, resulting in focal emphysema. My patient samples will be taken through bronchoscopy from lung tissue. But I wanted to ask how to provide control groups regarding medical ethics? How can I compare my results if I would not have the control negative group?
It would probably be difficult ethically to take lung biopsies via bronchoscopy from "normal" volunteers . You could perhaps try and get tissue from other patients who underwent bronchoscopy biopsy and who had never worked in coal mines and were never subject to coal burning heating and were never smokers.
Otherwise, you would have to rely on dose effects within the patients you are investigating..
Not sure why you would do this research at all. This field has been well studied for many years. See e.g papers in my RG entry.
Dear Mousa:
As always, the design of a rsearch, choosing adequate controls included, depends on exactly what question you want to answer by this research. If, for instance, you are interested in dependence of lung function or tbc risk or cancer risk etc on presence of pneumoconiotic lesions, your best choice would be a contr0l group of persons working in the same enterprise (e.g. a coal mine) of the same average age and employment's duration having, however, no pneuimoconiosis.
I would like to thank James and Boris for their really helpful answers. it is appear that my question was not explained well. so briefly, I am going to investigate the expression level and methylation status of P16 gene and the correlation between these two parameters in patients with anthracosis using real time PCR and Bisufite sequencing, respectively. but I am not sure how to select my control groups.
James might say that hundreds of scientific papers on coalworkers' pneumoconioses were published in the 20th century, but it does not mean that there is nothing to redearch in this field. However I do not understand, why lung biopsy samples are necessary: do not blood nucleated cells have the same genes?
Yes they have the same genome but not the epigenetic state that is our focus
Dear Mousa, ethical issues in medicine are very tricky especially when invasive procedures are considered. So I perfectly well understand your situation. A possible solution is the one Jame suggested. I think you can find easily such people in the Medical centre of your university. You can try as well to recruit healthy volunteers by an advertisement after the procedure has been approved by the Ethical committee of your centre.
Recruitment of volunteers may be very ethical but a control group thus formed may be quite inadequate in the framework of a particular study. I still believe that one should, first of all, think about characteristics which must be equal in the groups to be compared.. As to the ethics, the first question is whether the new knowlege you hope to obtain is worth invasive tests at all.
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