Abstract
Positron emission tomography (PET) technology offers clinical researchers the opportunity to gain unprecedented understanding of the neurobiologic correlates of pediatric illness. In contrast to other forms of functional neuroimaging, PET provides direct information on neurochemical activity, such as neurotransmitter function in the human brain (1). Such data may prove invaluable to the understanding of brain maturation and the development of novel pharmacologic treatments for children. However, because PET is a radionuclear medicine technique and children are classified as a vulnerable population requiring special safeguards, PET utilization in pediatric research is controversial. The involvement of healthy children in PET research is an especially contentious issue, and to date fewer than a dozen such studies have been conducted in the United States.
The views stated herein do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, or any other agency of the United States Government.
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Keywords
- Positron Emission Tomography
- Single Photon Emission Compute Tomography
- Minimal Risk
- Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry
- Cerebral Glucose Metabolism
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Munson, S., Eshel, N., Ernst, M. (2006). Ethics of PET Research in Children. In: Charron, M. (eds) Pediatric PET Imaging. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-34641-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-34641-4_7
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