Animal Testing at Universities - Definition of Terms
August 12, 2015 9:14 AM Subscribe
The Canadian Council on Animal Care, which regulates university research involving animals, provides "acute non-survival studies in which the animals are completely anesthetized and do not regain consciousness" as an example of an experiment "which cause little or no discomfort or stress." What's a "non-survival study"? And, what's a "survival study"?
I'm citing from the CCAC policy statement on: categories of invasiveness in animal experiments. Google isn't helping me to get a straightforward definition of these terms. Thanks all.
I'm citing from the CCAC policy statement on: categories of invasiveness in animal experiments. Google isn't helping me to get a straightforward definition of these terms. Thanks all.
Best answer: Basically, it's saying "no vivisecting conscious animals" (and "no performing fatal operations on animals and allowing them to regain consciousness before they die").
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:30 AM on August 12, 2015
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:30 AM on August 12, 2015
Best answer: What's a "non-survival study"? And, what's a "survival study"?
Non-survival study = animal subjects die/are killed
Survival study = animal subjects survive
I believe in an acute non-survival study they are killed fairly quickly; in a prolonged non-survival study they are kept alive (under anesthesia of some sort) for several hours or days to observe, for example, a drug working through the animal's system over several hours. An acute non-survival study might inject a drug and watch the immediate reaction over half an hour before killing the animal for necropsy.
An example of a survival study -- my university's lab was assisting in tests of a heartworm pill for dogs. The local kill shelter called them whenever they had a dog with heartworm. The dogs went to live at the university lab for six weeks, taking heartworm medicine doses in various concentrations and being tested (mostly by ultrasound) to survey the progress of the disease and cure. When cured, they were adopted by grad students. (In theory they could go back to the non-kill side of the shelter, now cured of heartworm and adoptable, but in practice, grad students kept falling in love with them.) They also had some survival studies of aquarium fish genetics which was basically, big tanks of fish, being sorted for various traits, and then having fish sex in other big tanks, living out their lives in ... the same sort of fish tanks they would have done anyway. And another one with chickens with simulated day and night studying how light interacts with egg-laying. Two cushy chicken accommodations, one on a 24-hour day, one on a 20-hour day.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:35 AM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]
Non-survival study = animal subjects die/are killed
Survival study = animal subjects survive
I believe in an acute non-survival study they are killed fairly quickly; in a prolonged non-survival study they are kept alive (under anesthesia of some sort) for several hours or days to observe, for example, a drug working through the animal's system over several hours. An acute non-survival study might inject a drug and watch the immediate reaction over half an hour before killing the animal for necropsy.
An example of a survival study -- my university's lab was assisting in tests of a heartworm pill for dogs. The local kill shelter called them whenever they had a dog with heartworm. The dogs went to live at the university lab for six weeks, taking heartworm medicine doses in various concentrations and being tested (mostly by ultrasound) to survey the progress of the disease and cure. When cured, they were adopted by grad students. (In theory they could go back to the non-kill side of the shelter, now cured of heartworm and adoptable, but in practice, grad students kept falling in love with them.) They also had some survival studies of aquarium fish genetics which was basically, big tanks of fish, being sorted for various traits, and then having fish sex in other big tanks, living out their lives in ... the same sort of fish tanks they would have done anyway. And another one with chickens with simulated day and night studying how light interacts with egg-laying. Two cushy chicken accommodations, one on a 24-hour day, one on a 20-hour day.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:35 AM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]
Best answer: I'm not sure whether the CCAC has precise definitions for those two terms or if they're just using "acute non-survival" to describe a situation where the animal doesn't survive the experiment. My guess is the latter. In my (CCAC-approved) research, survival study means that we're looking at how something affects survival (of cancer-bearing animals, in our case). Or more accurately, the animals are kept alive until their illness progresses to a point where they need to be euthanized for humane reasons.
I'm not sure what exactly a non-survival study would be since I've never heard anyone use that term in real life. My guess is that it could refer to either a situation where the animals are euthanized immediately after the experiment (as in the context described in the question), or a situation where animals are monitored for some time and then euthanized at some predetermined point, i.e. survival times are not being studied.
posted by randomnity at 9:39 AM on August 12, 2015
I'm not sure what exactly a non-survival study would be since I've never heard anyone use that term in real life. My guess is that it could refer to either a situation where the animals are euthanized immediately after the experiment (as in the context described in the question), or a situation where animals are monitored for some time and then euthanized at some predetermined point, i.e. survival times are not being studied.
posted by randomnity at 9:39 AM on August 12, 2015
Response by poster: Thank you all--I think I was confused by a study involving euthanasia being ranked so low on the "little or no discomfort or stress" scale, but I guess the point is that the animal doesn't know it's going to die. I'm going to leave this question open for a bit longer as I appreciate hearing more about animal research and would welcome PMs on this topic.
posted by monkeymonkey at 9:42 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by monkeymonkey at 9:42 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Yeah, what other folks said. People who are determining the lethal dose of a drug or compound, or testing the efficacy of a new radiation therapy on tumors in mice, or learning how bones heal, are doing survival studies--one of the questions being answered is "will this animal survive this?". That's generally where detailed protocols come in to make sure that every animal is being well-cared for and that the experiments are sufficiently well-designed that each animal is crucial to answering the question being asked.
People who need brain tissue for studies to be performed on Petri dishes, or who need bones for mechanical testing which would be cruel to do in vivo, or who are testing a new kind of preservation/staining technique, will not do a survival study; its first experiment will be performed under anesthesia or after euthanasia, and as a result the animal will not be pained by the experiment. (Sometimes these experiments can happen in parallel to other survival or non-survival experiments. A friend was hoping for a non-human primate aorta for a comparative study and when an elderly behavioral research animal was being euthanized, she said there was quite a line of people.)
Just read your update--I wanted to add that in survival studies, euthanasia is considered a humane end-point when the hypothesized treatment doesn't work or when some unexpected issue crops up. (It's a bigger deal if the animal dies without being euthanized, the question is then of what symptoms it was displaying in the days before and who hadn't noticed.) From what I've seen the folks working with research animals are much more thoughtful about their choices compared to folks at a meat-packing plant. I don't work directly with animals but I work directly with folks who do; if you do have followup questions from an "outsider's inside" perspective, feel free to PM me.
posted by tchemgrrl at 9:54 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
People who need brain tissue for studies to be performed on Petri dishes, or who need bones for mechanical testing which would be cruel to do in vivo, or who are testing a new kind of preservation/staining technique, will not do a survival study; its first experiment will be performed under anesthesia or after euthanasia, and as a result the animal will not be pained by the experiment. (Sometimes these experiments can happen in parallel to other survival or non-survival experiments. A friend was hoping for a non-human primate aorta for a comparative study and when an elderly behavioral research animal was being euthanized, she said there was quite a line of people.)
Just read your update--I wanted to add that in survival studies, euthanasia is considered a humane end-point when the hypothesized treatment doesn't work or when some unexpected issue crops up. (It's a bigger deal if the animal dies without being euthanized, the question is then of what symptoms it was displaying in the days before and who hadn't noticed.) From what I've seen the folks working with research animals are much more thoughtful about their choices compared to folks at a meat-packing plant. I don't work directly with animals but I work directly with folks who do; if you do have followup questions from an "outsider's inside" perspective, feel free to PM me.
posted by tchemgrrl at 9:54 AM on August 12, 2015 [1 favorite]
-I think I was confused by a study involving euthanasia being ranked so low on the "little or no discomfort or stress" scale, but I guess the point is that the animal doesn't know it's going to die.
Right- if the animal falls asleep and never wakes up, it doesn't experience discomfort or stress, it's just not alive anymore.
Lots of people who are not opposed to animal testing in general still take a moral stance precluding what amounts to torture, so this type of testing is acceptable to more people than a test where the animal experiences pain.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:54 AM on August 12, 2015
Right- if the animal falls asleep and never wakes up, it doesn't experience discomfort or stress, it's just not alive anymore.
Lots of people who are not opposed to animal testing in general still take a moral stance precluding what amounts to torture, so this type of testing is acceptable to more people than a test where the animal experiences pain.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:54 AM on August 12, 2015
Best answer: An example of a non-survival study would be the biodistribution studies I was a lab tech for back in the early nineties. We were studying how AZT was taken up by various bodily organs in order to help evaluate metabolic pathways and toxicities. The studies involved taking, say, 40 mice, injecting them with AZT that had been labelled with tritium, and then sacrificing (euthanizing) them at 10, 30, 60, and 120 minutes after the injection time. (Ten mice per time group, obviously.) The mice would then be dissected, their organs would be parceled out and individually incinerated, and the tritium levels in each organ would be recorded. This would give a good idea of how the AZT was moving through the mouse's metabolism over time. It couldn't be performed as a survival study because of the method used for evaluating the AZT uptake -- dissection and incineration.
The mice were sacrificed via cervical dislocation -- in blunt language, we broke their necks. Because stress can drastically affect metabolism, as well as for obvious ethical reasons, a great deal of care was taken to ensure that the mice were not uncomfortable or freaked out for the duration of the study, right up to the instant of death. The cervical dislocation method we used was extremely fast to the point of being instantaneous. The studies I personally was part of involved, in total, the deaths of probably thousands of mice, and I can think of three individual mice who exhibited any greater sign of stress than extremely brief surprise. Two of them were a pair of mice in the 120 minute group who had gotten into a fight in their cage while we were at lunch, and the third was a mouse where the cervical dislocation procedure took about three seconds as opposed to the typical fraction of a second. I would say that "little to no discomfort or stress" was pretty accurate.
posted by KathrynT at 10:00 AM on August 12, 2015
The mice were sacrificed via cervical dislocation -- in blunt language, we broke their necks. Because stress can drastically affect metabolism, as well as for obvious ethical reasons, a great deal of care was taken to ensure that the mice were not uncomfortable or freaked out for the duration of the study, right up to the instant of death. The cervical dislocation method we used was extremely fast to the point of being instantaneous. The studies I personally was part of involved, in total, the deaths of probably thousands of mice, and I can think of three individual mice who exhibited any greater sign of stress than extremely brief surprise. Two of them were a pair of mice in the 120 minute group who had gotten into a fight in their cage while we were at lunch, and the third was a mouse where the cervical dislocation procedure took about three seconds as opposed to the typical fraction of a second. I would say that "little to no discomfort or stress" was pretty accurate.
posted by KathrynT at 10:00 AM on August 12, 2015
Um, none of those explanations given above your reply make any sense given the sentence you've shown. It says it's a non-survival study where the animals are killed under anesthetic. So clearly a non-survival study is not one where the animal lives afterwards.
While I'm not familiar with the exact wording the CCAC is using here, but as a biomedical scientist I would call a survival study one where they are measuring survival. So a drug study where they measure how much drug or how long after the drug until the animal dies or is so sick it has to be killed, or a tumour growth study where they measure how fast the tumour grows until the animal dies or needs to be killed. Survival is a common experimental endpoint in biomedical sciences. A non-survival study is one where you don't care if the animal lives or dies, either because you kill it anyway or because you know for sure it will live. So all your best answers are wrong (which is why you shouldn't ask lay people about scientific language).
Also, in those categories you link to, A) would not be counted (doesn't even need an ethics approval in some places), B) and (less so) C) would be the most common, D would be very rare and E) would be either incredibly uncommon and need special permission or just totally not allowed. Assuming Canada works like the rest of the Western world.
posted by shelleycat at 10:01 AM on August 12, 2015
While I'm not familiar with the exact wording the CCAC is using here, but as a biomedical scientist I would call a survival study one where they are measuring survival. So a drug study where they measure how much drug or how long after the drug until the animal dies or is so sick it has to be killed, or a tumour growth study where they measure how fast the tumour grows until the animal dies or needs to be killed. Survival is a common experimental endpoint in biomedical sciences. A non-survival study is one where you don't care if the animal lives or dies, either because you kill it anyway or because you know for sure it will live. So all your best answers are wrong (which is why you shouldn't ask lay people about scientific language).
Also, in those categories you link to, A) would not be counted (doesn't even need an ethics approval in some places), B) and (less so) C) would be the most common, D would be very rare and E) would be either incredibly uncommon and need special permission or just totally not allowed. Assuming Canada works like the rest of the Western world.
posted by shelleycat at 10:01 AM on August 12, 2015
Response by poster: shelleycat, any chance you could link me to a resource that elaborates on your use of the term "non-survival study" as meaning "it doesn't matter if the animal subject lives or dies"? I have access to a university library so even the name of a particular research article would be great. Thanks.
posted by monkeymonkey at 10:06 AM on August 12, 2015
posted by monkeymonkey at 10:06 AM on August 12, 2015
Oh I was wrong, randomity is getting towards the right answer. But this, for example, is totally wrong:
Non-survival study = animal subjects die/are killed
Survival study = animal subjects survive
Actually it's more like:
Non-survival study: survival is not measured as an experimental outcome. You either assume they will all live, kill them all regardless, or don't care either way for whatever reason.
Survival study: survival is measured as an experimental outcome. Your treatment may or may not kill the animal and how fast and how often is what you're measuring.
The whole euthanasia being rated so low thing is a different thing altogether. Any manipulations done happen while the animal is totally unaware of them. And any long term effects of the manipulations or the anaesthetic, even just stress from being handled or whatever, don't exist because the animal dies first. Even the euthanasia itself is totally clear because the animal is unconscious anyway so there's no way it can know what is happening. The only way to do nicer experiments is to kill it then use the body afterwards or leave it alive but don't touch it. That's why they're all rated the lowest.
posted by shelleycat at 10:10 AM on August 12, 2015
Non-survival study = animal subjects die/are killed
Survival study = animal subjects survive
Actually it's more like:
Non-survival study: survival is not measured as an experimental outcome. You either assume they will all live, kill them all regardless, or don't care either way for whatever reason.
Survival study: survival is measured as an experimental outcome. Your treatment may or may not kill the animal and how fast and how often is what you're measuring.
The whole euthanasia being rated so low thing is a different thing altogether. Any manipulations done happen while the animal is totally unaware of them. And any long term effects of the manipulations or the anaesthetic, even just stress from being handled or whatever, don't exist because the animal dies first. Even the euthanasia itself is totally clear because the animal is unconscious anyway so there's no way it can know what is happening. The only way to do nicer experiments is to kill it then use the body afterwards or leave it alive but don't touch it. That's why they're all rated the lowest.
posted by shelleycat at 10:10 AM on August 12, 2015
Best answer: It's more a case of reading a lot of studies using these different types of outcomes. I wouldn't even know where to start finding different ones showing different things because I kind of swim in that world all the time (I'm a cancer researcher). Plus I am totally unfamiliar with the Canadian context specifically. This is the relevant EU directive but I don't know that it's any more helpful.
You're better off either contacting the CCAC directly or looking at who provides training to animal researchers in Canada (which may be the same thing, I don't know) and either contacting them or looking at their recommended training materials. Or finding a trained animal researcher at your University and asking them how those exact terms are used there.
posted by shelleycat at 10:14 AM on August 12, 2015
You're better off either contacting the CCAC directly or looking at who provides training to animal researchers in Canada (which may be the same thing, I don't know) and either contacting them or looking at their recommended training materials. Or finding a trained animal researcher at your University and asking them how those exact terms are used there.
posted by shelleycat at 10:14 AM on August 12, 2015
Oh also (last comment I promise!), I would call them survival studies because of the inclusion of survival curves, aka Kaplan-Meier Analysis. So that may be something to google.
posted by shelleycat at 10:17 AM on August 12, 2015
posted by shelleycat at 10:17 AM on August 12, 2015
Response by poster: shelleycat's advice to simply contact the CCAC for an answer to how they were using the term was very helpful, thank you. FYI, CCAC confirms that a "non-survival study" means the animal subject isn't going to survive the experimental procedure (ie they are euthanized). Thanks all. I'll close the question but I still welcome PMs from people who are themselves animal researchers or who work with animal researchers.
posted by monkeymonkey at 10:25 AM on August 12, 2015
posted by monkeymonkey at 10:25 AM on August 12, 2015
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posted by jessamyn at 9:25 AM on August 12, 2015 [2 favorites]