Recognition and Alleviation of Distress in Laboratory Animals (2008) / Chapter Skim
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4 Avoiding, Minimizing, and Alleviating Distress
4 Avoiding, Minimizing, and Alleviating Distress
Pages 63-86
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Introduction Established ethical, regulatory, and scientific practices, standards, and policies mandate avoiding animal distress whenever possible. However, if research or regulatory testing objectives cause a research animal to experience distress, it is incumbent upon the animal user to identify the cause(s)
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It is important to weigh any possibly adverse impact of replacement, refinement, and reduction on scientific outcome against both the negative impact of failure to avoid, minimize, or alleviate stress and distress on the research data and the numbers of potentially wasted animal lives. This chapter identifies approaches to avoid or minimize distress through the alleviation and minimization of stress, in both the care and use of laboratory animals.
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2000) , sound and ultrasound can be stressful and cause external variation n the interest of uniformity and adherence to commonly accepted normative values, the I Committee chose the word "normal" to describe the life of a laboratory animal that, if not subjected to experimental procedures, would live mostly undisturbed.
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. Singly housed mice prefer ambient temperatures of 28-30°C while group-housed mice prefer a slightly colder environment with ambient temperatures of 24-27°C (NRC 2003b, page 97)
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can increase the acute stress response (as evidenced by elevated heart rate and body temperature) of individually housed mice (Meier et al.
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. Social housing can activate stress responses involving the HPA axis in rats, but when a wider range of measures is taken into account, overall, social housing is neither stressful nor harmful (Hurst et al.
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. Cardiovascular and behavioral changes, such as elevated blood pressure, heart rate, and movement, lasted up to 60 min after changing the cages of adult male Sprague Dawley rats (Duke et al.
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For example, if the experimental design justifies it, the one-time surgical implantation of vascular lines and sensors can replace manual restraint for frequent blood collection or other physiological measurements, to avoid repeatedly subjecting the animal to stressful experiences (proper aseptic techniques and frequent peridermal maintenance is required when handling such surgical implants; for more information see chronically instrumented nonhuman primates in Broadbear et al.
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. Humane Endpoints Validated endpoints that occur earlier in the course of the protocol and involve no detectable indication of disease, injury, or abnormal behavior can prevent or minimize distress in experimentation and testing.
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Sample Size Determination Appropriate statistical analyses are useful for the reduction of the n umbers of animals used and determination of the desired statistical power and minimum sample size values (n) needed to discriminate between significantly different groups or endpoints (NRC 2003a)
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; 2. Choosing appropriate animal strains (helps control variation; for example, the use of isogenic or inbred murine strains may be more appropriate than outbred ones in some experimental designs ( Festing and Altman 2002; Festing et al.
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Similarly, the use of appropriate sequential experimental designs can result in a reduction in the numbers of animals that experience distress, as this technique allows the analysis of data as they accumulate (Waterton et al.
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. Alleviating Distress in Laboratory Animals As has been noted in Chapter 3, even with reasonable steps to avoid or minimize housing and husbandry-related stressors, distress may still unexpectedly appear once a protocol begins or following a change in h usbandry.
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For example, the clinical signs of a distressed animal often include dehydration and weight loss resulting from anorexia. Provision of supplemental fluids and nutrition may relieve the compounding impact of dehydration or poor body condition on the compromised animal.
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. Taylor and colleagues used a combination of chlorpromazine, buprenorphine, and environmental enrichment to successfully treat a self-injurious behavior in a rhesus monkey (Taylor et al.
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If the distress is appropriately caused by the research protocol, then the animal will either remain on the study without treatment or -- if severely compromised -- euthanized. If the distress is caused by an external perturbation, such as husbandry issues, that can be corrected without a direct therapeutic intervention on the animal (which might interfere with protocol)
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A significant portion of research with laboratory animals deals with pathology resulting in distress, incapacitation, or death for the animals. While it is often possible to study incapacitating or lethal conditions while using palliative agents or euthanasia in order to alleviate or preclude animal distress, it is not possible to adequately investigate distress itself without allowing it to occur.
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