The Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing is an academic center affiliated with the Division of Toxicological Sciences in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.

 

Johns Hopkins School of Public Health

Research Grants 2002-2003

Measures to Reduce Stress Caused by Experimental Procedures

Bert van Zutphen, PhD and Vera Baumans, DVM
University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Animals that are used in biomedical research are often submitted to routine experimental procedures. These procedures may cause an imbalance of the animal's homeostasis ('stress'. The purpose of the present project is to measure the animal's stress response to such procedures and to investigate the options for refinement. Is it possible to reduce the stress response through environmental enrichment or through conditioning of the animals? In this study the focus is on injection techniques in mice. It is anticipated that the stress response not only depends on the experimental procedure per se but also on the animal's environmental circumstances (e.g. social housing vs. individual housing; physically enriched housing vs. standard housing) and on the degree of conditioning.

Thus, groups of animals housed under different conditions, will be submitted to routine experimental procedures and the (difference in) stress response will be measured.

In the first year the effects of different kinds of housing conditions will be studied in two mouse inbred strains (BALB/C and C57BL/C). At a later stage the effect of conditioning will be subject of study.

Parameters for measuring the stress response include heart rate, body temperature, activity, food intake, body weight and corticosteroids.

The application of radio-telemetry is needed for stress-free collection of data on heart rate and body temperature. For this purpose a transmitter must be implanted into the abdomen of the animal. Studying the consequences of this procedure is also part of the present project.

Milestones for the first year will be to find answers to the following questions: