A novel multi-parametric analysis of non-invasive methods to assess animal distress during chronic pancreatitis

Abstract

ethical responsibility, legal requirements and the need to improve the quality of research create a growing interest in the welfare of laboratory animals. Judging the welfare of animals requires readout parameters, which are valid and sensitive as well as specific to assess distress after different interventions. In the present study, we evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of different non-invasive parameters (body weight change, faecal corticosterone metabolites concentration, burrowing and nesting activity) by receiver operating characteristic curves and judged the merit of a multi-parametric analysis by logistic regression. Chronic pancreatitis as well as laparotomy caused significant changes in all parameters. However, the accuracy of these parameters was different between the two animal models. in both animal models, the multi-parametric analysis relying on all the readout parameters had the highest accuracy when predicting distress. this multi-parametric analysis revealed that C57BL/6 mice during the course of chronic pancreatitis often experienced less distress than mice after laparotomy. interestingly these data also suggest that distress does not steadily increase during chronic pancreatitis. in conclusion, combining these non-invasive methods for severity assessment represents a reliable approach to evaluate animal distress in models such as chronic pancreatitis.

Social isolation in rats: Effects on animal welfare and molecular markers for neuroplasticity

“…In terms of welfare, there is growing evidence that multimodal analysis is a more valuable approach towards evidence-based assessment of severity in laboratory animals [ 95 – 97 ]. In this study, we focused on burrowing and could not find differences between the groups besides the short-term decrease directly after resocialization.…”

MicroRNAs as systemic biomarkers to assess distress in animal models for gastrointestinal diseases

“…FCMs were not analyzed after BDL, because steroid hormones are known to be excreted via the bile duct 72 . Some of the data from the distress assessment was already published in other contexts 16,71,73 .…”

“…Several parameters, which might be used for distress assessment in rodents, were introduced in the last decade, such as body weight change, clinical scores 5 , voluntary wheel running 6 , nesting behavior 7 , 8 , burrowing activity 9 – 11 , concentrations of plasma corticosterone 12 , 13 and fecal corticosterone metabolites (FCMs) 14 , 15 . By applying these parameters a first evidence-based severity grading on a few animal models and experimental procedures was obtained 6 , 16 – 18 . However, even these mostly non-invasive and easy to assess measures carry some disadvantages.…”

Non-invasive Methods for Measuring and Monitoring Stress Physiology in Imperiled Amphibians

“…Integrated measures of corticosterone profiles using noninvasive methods, such as fecal GC metabolites, water-borne, and urinary GC provide better, and earlier, indicators of chronic stress than do point measures, such as that from blood plasma (Dickens and Romero, 2013). Using GC hormone monitoring, we can obtain valuable information on the role of stress physiology in amphibian (and other organisms) breeding and survival across seasons and years (Boonstra, 2013;de Bruijn and Romero, 2018;Abdelrahman et al, 2019). Further, noninvasive methods of GC collection eliminate the need for euthanizing individuals and represent an integrated measure of episodic changes in cumulative stress over a time period through repeated sampling (Whitten et al, 1998;Touma et al, 2004).…”