Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Johnny RoughanORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2019 Redaelli et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.The principles of Refinement, Replacement and Reduction (3R's) should be taken into account when animals must be used for scientific purpose. Here, a Reduction / Refinement approach was applied to the procedure of spinal cord injury (SCI), an animal model used in rehabilitation medicine research, in order to improve the quality of experiments, avoiding unnecessary suffering. The aims of this investigation were 1- to assess acute surgical pain in mice subjected to SCI, 2- to compare the efficacy of commonly used analgesia (three buprenorphine subcutaneous injection in 48 hours, 0,15 mg/kg each) with a combination of opioid and NSAID (one subcutaneous injection of 5 mg/kg carprofen before surgery followed by three buprenorphine subcutaneous injection in 48 hours, 0,15 mg/kg each) and 3- to test if Infrared Thermography (IRT) could be a potential new Refinement method to easily assess thermoregulation, an important metabolic parameter. Finally, we aimed to achieve these goals without recruiting animals on purpose, but using mice already scheduled for studies on SCI. By using behaviours analysis, we found that, despite being commonly used, buprenorphine does not completely relieve acute surgical pain, whereas the combination of buprenorphine and carprofen significantly decreases pain signs by 80%. IRT technology turned out to be a very useful Refinement tool being a non invasive methods to measure animal temperature, particularly useful when rectal probe cannot be used, as in the case of SCI. We could find that temperatures constantly and significantly increased until 7 days after surgery and then slowly decreased and, finally, we could observe that in the buprenorphine and carprofen treated group, temperatures were statistically lower than in the buprenorphine-alone treated mice. To our knowledge this is the first work providing an analgesic Refinement and a description of thermoregulatory response using the IRT technology, in mice subjected to SCI.
Author(s): Redaelli V, Papa S, Marsella G, Grignaschi G, Bosi A, Ludwig N, Luzi F, Vismara I, Rimondo S, Veglianese P, Tepteva S, Mazzola S, Zerbi P, Porcu L, Roughan JV, Parati G, Calvillo L
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: PLoS ONE
Year: 2019
Volume: 14
Issue: 10
Online publication date: 30/10/2019
Acceptance date: 10/10/2019
Date deposited: 11/11/2019
ISSN (print): 2072-4292
Publisher: Public Library of Science
URL: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224337
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0224337
PubMed id: 31665157
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
