HJBR May/Jun 2019

research breakdown 22 MAY / JUN 2019 I  Healthcare Journal of BATON ROUGE   For nearly University of Illinois at Chicago has touted child psychiatrist Mani Pavuluri as one of its stars: She founded a renowned clinic to treat children with bipolar disorder and secured millions of dollars in coveted federal funding to help unlock the mysteries of the disease. Parents from around the country brought their children to see her. She helped boost the university as a leader in the field of child psychiatry. But as Pavuluri’s reputation grew, she put some of these par- ticularly vulnerable children at serious risk in one of her clini- cal trials. She violated research rules by testing the powerful drug lithium on children younger than 13 although she was told not to, failed to properly alert parents of the study’s risks and falsified data to cover up the misconduct, records show. two decades, the