This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Laboratory animals are anesthetized to avoid pain during invasive procedures. Anesthesia is necessary for these animals' welfare, but it is not always without problems: Substandard anesthesia can cause suffering, distort experimental results and force researchers to repeat tests on more animals.
A research group at the University of Helsinki's Faculty of Veterinary Medicine is looking to solve these problems. One of the most striking problems is that certain commonly used sedatives cause exophthalmos in rats, which means their eyes bulge out of their sockets. Although this adverse effect has been known since the 1980s, the sedatives that cause it remain widely used.
Abnormally protruding eyes are exposed to painful injuries. Minna Mustikka is a specialist in veterinary ophthalmology, or animal eye diseases, and is investigating in her doctoral thesis whether a drug called vatinoxan could help. A vatinoxan product the research group developed in collaboration with the Finnish company Vetcare for canine sedation appears to also improve the safety of small rodents during anesthesia.
"Vatinoxan is proving to be the genuine article: We have demonstrated that in rats, it prevents the dramatic bulging of eyes associated with the use of common sedative combinations and alleviates other adverse effects occurring inside the eye. The findings have already been groundbreaking for the welfare of laboratory rats," Mustikka says. Mustikka's first article for her doctoral thesis has been published in the Journal of Ocular Pharmacology and Therapeutics.
In another doctoral thesis, Emily Lindh investigates what vatinoxan does to murine blood circulation during sedation. Lindh, who is interested in laboratory animal medicine, has conducted pioneering work on the general properties of vatinoxan as part of anesthesia in rats and mice. "Sedation and anesthesia are necessary for the humane treatment of animals, but the adverse effects of the drugs used should not compromise the reliability of research findings.
In my doctoral thesis, I demonstrate that vatinoxan improves tissue oxygenation in rats by reducing the adverse circulatory effects of sedatives," Lindh says. Lindh has shown that vatinoxan also inhibits the increase in blood glucose caused by these sedatives and excessive urine output in rats. Her research has been published in Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia and BMC Veterinary Research.
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