Many readouts are used to evaluate and determine animal distress and the severity of experimental procedures. The fundament of an evidence-based severity assessment in laboratory animal science is reliable distress parameters. In summary, SGS and telemetry-derived data were suitable to detect post-operative pain in sheep with the potential to improve individual pain recognition and postoperative management, which consequently contributes to refinement. The SGS mildly elevated directly after transmitter implantation, but increased to higher levels after tendon ablation immediately after surgery and on the following day. Immediately after surgery, clinical score and HR were slightly increased and activity was decreased in individual sheep after both surgeries. Clinical scoring and video recordings for SGS analysis were performed after both surgeries and heart rate (HR) and general activity were monitored by telemetry. After three to four weeks of recovery, sheep underwent tendon ablation of the left M. Telemetric devices were implanted in a first surgery subcutaneously into four German blackheaded mutton ewes (4-5 years, 77-115kg). Therefore, in the present study, accompanying a surgical pilot study telemetry and the Sheep Grimace Scale (SGS) were used in addition to clinical scoring for severity assessment after surgical interventions in sheep. However, methods for adequate severity assessment, especially considering pain, are rather rare regarding large animal models. Naturally, a good pain management is mandatory for animal welfare, although it is also important with regard to data quality. Sheep are frequently used in translational surgical orthopedic studies. With this, the following order of severity was found for the animal models: CCl4 This approach allowed us to compare the severity of individual animals in the experimental subgroups using the maximum achieved severity (RELSAmax). To address the complex nature of the multi-dimensional severity space, we used the Relative Severity Assessment (RELSA) procedure to combine multiple distress parameters into a score and mapped the subgroups and models against a defined reference set obtained by telemeter implantation. However, the body weight still was highly robust in BDL, pancreatitis, and CCl4 intoxication. On the other hand, we also found that burrowing and nesting can be more robust than, e.g., the body weight when evaluating PDA. It was found that the performance of the readout parameters is model-dependent and that the distress score is prone to experimental variation. We used non-parametric bootstrapping to get robust estimates and 95% confidence intervals for the experimental groups. Further, we determined the parameters’ robustness in various experimental subgroups due to slight variations like drug treatment or telemeter implantations. Therefore, we analyzed four distinct parameters like the body weight, burrowing behavior, nesting, and distress score in the four gastrointestinal animal models (pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA), pancreatitis, CCl4 intoxication, and bile duct ligation (BDL)). Abstract The fundament of an evidence-based severity assessment in laboratory animal science is reliable distress parameters.
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