Recognition and Alleviation of Distress in Laboratory Animals (2008) / Chapter Skim
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2 Stress and Distress: Definitions
2 Stress and Distress: Definitions
Pages 13-24
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From page 13... ...
Because there is in fact good scientific evidence for both an adaptive stress response and a state of distress, it is important to distinguish these terms. Even though this chapter attempts to clarify these terms as much as possible, the available scientific information -- while useful -- is far from complete, and distress remains a complex and still poorly understood phenomenon.
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From page 14... ...
Because no single biological parameter can adequately inform on a stressful condition and no single stress response is present in all stress-related situations, there are many definitions of stress based primarily on metrics used to test hypothetical models of this state. A general distillation of the literature suggests that stress denotes a real or perceived perturbation to an organism's physiological homeostasis or p sychological well-being.
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From page 15... ...
. Progression into the maladaptive state may be due to a severe or prolonged stressor or multiple cumulative stressful insults with etailed information on behavioral and physiological data of various subsets of murine D inbred strains is available at the Mouse Phenome Database at the Jackson Laboratory; http:// aretha.jax.org/pub-cgi/phenome/mpdcgi.
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From page 16... ...
Notable among these studies are findings that rats exposed to inescapable shock develop clear signs of distress, whereas yoked rats that can terminate shock exposure do not, despite subjection to the same intensity and duration of shock experience (Maier and Watkins 2005)
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From page 17... ...
. Prolonged or severe stress depletes bodily reserves and affects normal functions thus requiring extended time to revert to homeostasis.
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From page 18... ...
, including its ability to control its environment or predict the onset of a stressor. In these discussions, the term " suffer/suffering" is often used, albeit controversially due to lack of con sensus with respect to the adverse emotional states to which it may allude, such as pain, distress, boredom, deprivation, fear, frustration, and grief, in which an animal may be said to suffer even for only a few minutes. Descriptors of an animal's welfare are qualitative and range from "poor" to "good" (other adjectives commonly used include "negative", "compromised", "neutral", and "positive")
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From page 19... ...
For example, an animal might have a life-threatening aneurysm but be unaware of it and therefore not experience a negative emotional state. In the longer term, however, a breakdown in an animal's ability to cope with its environment is likely to lead to adverse emotional states and poor welfare.
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From page 20... ...
Useful indicators include the animal's choice to continue or stop feeding while in a stressful situation, choice tests that demonstrate how (non) aversive a particular stressor is, or demand studies that titrate the extent of the animal's attraction or aversion to a potential stressor.
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From page 21... ...
The impact of distress on both animal welfare and research results is likely even more pronounced than that of stress. Animals exposed to prolonged severe stress experience underlying changes in physiological functions (e.g., gastric lesions [Ushijima 1985]
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From page 22... ...
• The concepts of stress and distress can be distinguished from that of welfare, in that an adaptive and beneficial stress response may occur against a backdrop of a transient negative emotional state. • Both stress and distress represent potential complications in a wide range of experiments, and should be proactively addressed by good experimental design.
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From page 23... ...
1994. Dietary restriction increases insulin sensitivity and lowers blood glucose in rhesus monkeys.
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From page 24... ...
2006. Impairment of the spatial learning and memory induced by learned helplessness and chronic mild stress.
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