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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Hanns Lochmuller, Emeritus Professor Simon WoodsORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).
There is a growing concern in the ethics literature and among policy makers that de-identification or coding of personal data and biospecimens is not sufficient for protecting research subjects from privacy invasions and possible breaches of confidentiality due to the possibility of unauthorized re-identification. At the same time, there is a need in medical science to be able to identify individual patients. In particular for rare disease research there is a special and well-documented need for research collaboration so that data and biosamples from multiple independent studies can be shared across borders. In this article, we identify the needs and arguments related to de-identification and re-identification of patients and research subjects and suggest how the different needs may be balanced within a framework of using unique encrypted identifiers.
Author(s): Hansson MG, Lochmuller H, Riess O, Schaefer F, Orth M, Rubinstein Y, Molster C, Dawkins H, Taruscio D, Posada M, Woods S
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: European Journal of Human Genetics
Year: 2016
Volume: 24
Issue: 11
Pages: 1553-1558
Print publication date: 01/11/2016
Online publication date: 25/05/2016
Acceptance date: 21/04/2016
Date deposited: 03/01/2017
ISSN (print): 1018-4813
ISSN (electronic): 1476-5438
Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ejhg.2016.52
DOI: 10.1038/ejhg.2016.52
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