Refinement Database

Database on Refinement of Housing, Husbandry, Care, and Use of Animals in Research

This database, created in 2000, is updated every four months with newly published scientific articles, books, and other publications related to improving or safeguarding the welfare of animals used in research.

Tips for using the database:

  • This landing page displays all of the publications in the database.
  • Use the drop-down menus to filter these publications by Animal Type, Setting, and/or Topic.
  • Clicking on a parent category (e.g., Rodent) will include publications relating to all the items in that category (e.g., Chinchilla, Gerbil, Guinea Pig, etc.).
  • You may also add a keyword to further narrow your search.
  • Please note that at this time, only publications dated 2010 or later (with some exceptions) can be filtered by Animal Type and Topic, and only publications dated 2020 or later (with some exceptions) can be filtered by Setting. Most publications older than 2010 can only be searched by keyword. 

Objective Mouse models are valuable in preclinical studies of inflammatory arthritis. However, current methods for measuring disease severity or responses to treatment are not optimal. In this study a smart cage system using multiple sensors...

Usage and reporting of analgesia in animal models of spinal cord injury (SCI) have been sparse and requires proper attention. The majority of experimental SCI research uses rats as an animal model. This study aimed...

Monitoring the activity of mice within their home cage is proving to be a powerful tool for revealing subtle and early-onset phenotypes in mouse models. Video-tracking, in particular, lends itself to automated machine-learning technologies that...

Leptin is a hormone that plays a key role in controlling food intake and energy homeostasis. Skeletal muscle is an important target for leptin and recent studies have shown that leptin deficiency may lead to...

Heart failure (HF) is a serious health and economic burden worldwide, and its prevalence is continuously increasing. Current medications effectively moderate the progression of symptoms, and there is a need for novel preventative and reparative...

An uncontrolled reproduction of animals in human hands should be avoided. To meet this goal, animals are widely castrated, i.e., the gonads are completely removed. Since the gonads are the most important source of sex...

Longitudinal studies on mouse models related to Alzheimer disease (AD) pathology play an important role in the investigation of therapeutic targets to help pharmaceutical research in the development of new drugs and in the attempt...

Animal welfare considerations are an essential part of scientific research. If animals may suffer, then even 26 the most promising research plans can be delayed or rejected and the resulting data may be questionable. 27...

Animal testing was and remains the only method of introducing a certain treatment and medical procedure on humans. On the other hand, animals have their rights resulting from applicable legal acts, including Directive 2010/63/EU and...

Disbudding calves using hot iron cautery is a routine management procedure to destroy the germinal cells around the horn bud in calves. It is recommended that NSAIDs are used in conjunction with local anaesthesia to...

This work aimed to define a humane endpoint scoring system able to objectively identify signs of animal suffering in a rat model of type 2 diabetes. Sprague-Dawley male rats were divided into control and induced...

Infrared thermography is a method that detects thermal radiation energy and can measure the body surface temperature of animals from a distance. While rectal temperature has traditionally been used to measure animals’ core temperature, thermal...

Adequate pain management is essential for ethical and scientific reasons in animal experiments and should completely cover the period of expected pain without the need for frequent re-application. However, current depot formulations of Buprenorphine are...

Environmental enrichment in zebrafish generally reduces anxiety-related behaviours, improves learning in maze trials and increases health and biological fitness. However, certain types of enrichment or certain conditions induce the opposite effects. Therefore, it is essential...

Rats emit ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs), sometimes referred to as 50-kHz vocalizations, during activities such as play and lower-frequency USVs, sometimes referred to as 22-kHz vocalizations, when experiencing distress. Definitions of 22-kHz vocalizations vary in terms...

The aim of this study was to identify whether or not dairy calves change their facial expression and heart rate according to their emotional state when subjected to a stroking or umbrella stimulus. Thirty-two mixed-breed...

Early-life adversity impacts on anxiety-related behaviors in adulthood. The effects of such adversity not only affect the animal itself, but can be passed on transgenerationally. Pervasive effects of experimentally-induced early-life stress (ELS) have been documented...

Hunger remains a significant animal welfare concern as restricted feeding practices are common on farms. Studies to date have focused on negative effects on health and productivity but little research has addressed the feeling of...

Facial expressions are an increasingly used tool to assess emotional experience and affective state during experimental procedures in animal models. Previous studies have successfully related specific facial features with different positive and negative valence situations...

Intrapleural injections can be used in mice to deliver therapeutic and diagnostic agents and to model human disease processes (for example, pleural fluid accumulation, malignant pleural disease, and lung cancers). In the context of establishing...

Patients with cirrhosis present multiple physiological and immunological alterations that play a very important role in the development of clinically relevant secondary complications to the disease. Experimentation in animal models is essential to understand the...

The RSPCA/UFAW Rodent Welfare Group has held a one-day meeting every autumn for the last 29 years, so that its members can discuss current welfare research, exchange views on welfare issues and share experiences of...

Effective vaccines are needed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Forty golden hamsters were inoculated with two promising vaccine candidates and eighteen animals were used in pilot trials with viral challenge. ELISA assays were performed to...

Facial expressions are widely recognized as universal indicators of underlying internal states in most species of animals, thereby presenting as a non-invasive measure for assessing physical and mental conditions. Despite the advancement of artificial intelligence-assisted...