This review highlights selected effects of untreated pain and of widely used analgesics such as opioids, non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs and antipyretics, to illustrate the relevance of carefully planned, appropriate and controlled analgesia for greater reproducibility...
In animal models, blood pressure measurement methods can be either invasive (direct) or non-invasive (indirect). The non-invasive alternative involves applying a tail-cuff for blood pressure measurement. Current standardized restraint methods involve confining the laboratory animal...
One of 2 models required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for registration of a treatment for osteoporosis, the ovariectomized (OVX) rat model, is widely used in scientific studies investigating sex hormone-deficient bone loss...
Although the metabolic cage is commonly used for housing nonhuman animals in the laboratory, it has been recognized as constituting a unique stressor. Such an environment would be expected to affect behavioral change in animals...
Several questions have been raised in recent years about the euthanasia of laboratory rodents. Euthanasia using inhaled agents is considered to be a suitable aesthetic method for use with a large number of animals simultaneously...
Score sheets were first introduced 30 years ago to assess pain, distress and suffering in animals. To date, however, there is still no general agreement on their use in research practice, and only a few...
Postoperative monitoring of pain and distress in small rodents is not standardized, and widely accepted score sheets are not available. Here we describe a score sheet used in abdominal surgery of rodents, with particular reference...
Fracture healing is a complex regeneration process which produces new bone tissue without scar formation. However, fracture healing disorders occur in approximately 10% of human patients and cause severe pain and reduced quality of life...
The cannulation of the cisterna magna in rats for in vivo sampling of cerebrospinal fluid serves as a valuable model for studying the delivery of new drugs into the central nervous system or disease models...
The use of animals is essential in biomedical research. The laboratory environment where the animals are housed has a major impact on them throughout their lives and influences the outcome of animal experiments. Therefore, there...