A new study finds that sedentary, obese rats and mice used in biomedical research are skewing human studies :
Failure to recognize that many laboratory animals live unhealthy lives may be leading researchers to misinterpret their findings, potentially misdirecting efforts to develop therapeutic drugs.
The problem, reports a group at the US National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Maryland, is that many rats and mice used in experiments are so overweight that they are glucose intolerant and heading for an early death (B. Martin et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi:10.1073/pnas.0912955107; 2010). As a result, data from the animals — about, for example, the effects of an anti-cancer drug — may not apply to normal-weight animals.
“The vast majority of investigators who use rats and mice don’t recognize that their normal conditions are relatively unhealthy,” says Mark Mattson, chief of the National Institute on Aging’s Laboratory of Neurosciences and a co-author on the paper. “The most logical way to extrapolate is to say any data we obtain in the animal model would be more relevant to overweight, sedentary humans than normal-weight, active individuals.”
Considering that many people—at least in America—are overweight and sedentary, I’m not sure why this is such a problem. But it does remind me of a question I’ve long wondered about: Why do we use rats to study the effects of drugs on humans?
Obviously, since rats and mice are commonly used in biomedical research, some very smart people are aware of why they are useful research subjects for humans. But why isn’t this explanation more widely known? This seems like the type of thing we should have been taught in high school biology. I know I’d have rather learned why rats are used in research than know what it’s like to take out a dead frog’s liver.
(Via: The Corner )
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