BMJ  2007;335:370-373 (25 August), doi:10.1136/bmj.39304.486146.AD

Feature

Research ethics

Hyperactivity in children: the Gillberg affair

London

What drove members of a highly respected psychiatric research group to defy the Swedish courts and destroy 15 years' worth of irreplaceable data? A decade after the Gillberg affair began, Jonathan Gornall examines the facts

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Over one weekend in May 2004, three researchers in the University of Gothenburg's department of child and adolescent psychiatry shredded tens of thousands of documents, destroying all data from a 15 year longitudinal study following 60 Swedish children with severe attention deficit disorders.

What became known as the Gillberg affair began in 1996, at a community summer party on the Swedish island of Resö. Among the guests were Leif Elinder, a paediatrician recently returned to Sweden after several years spent working abroad, and Christopher Gillberg, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Gothenburg University.

The men had known each other since childhood, when they had met on the island most summers. Professor Gillberg had since become a world expert in autism and attention deficit disorder and a leading proponent of deficits in attention, motor control, and perception (DAMP), a Nordic concept developed in the 1970s to describe a combination of . . . [Full text of this article]

Professional disagreement

Degrees of difference

Accusations of misconduct

An underlying motive?

Confidentiality

Destructive conclusion

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