Research involving prisoners entails several extra layers of regulatory oversight, due to prisoners’ status as a vulnerable population. Those regulatory restrictions stem from historical concerns about inmates’ abilities to make truly voluntary decisions about whether to join a study, and fears over exploitation of a readily available population.
One group of would-be researchers suggests the prison environment would be appropriate for a randomized control trial of salt’s effects on hypertension. As reported in Forbes online, there has been much discussion and little agreement regarding the role of dietary sodium in controlling blood pressure. Long-term diet studies are difficult to carry out in free-living populations, since individual dietary choices are hard to control, and the subjects in a salt-and-blood-pressure study would have to be follow the study’s diet plan for years. Please take a look at the Forbes article, and also at the original academic publication (request a copy from the IRB Blog Archives Department at paalediths@uams.edu if you’re not able to access it online). Do you think the prison population is appropriate for this kind of research?
The IRB Blog newsroom thanks research contracts attorney Nathan Chaney for bringing this article to our attention.