Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-30-2010
Abstract
- The value of animal experiments for predicting the effectiveness of treatment strategies in clinical trials has remained controversial, mainly because of a recurrent failure of interventions apparently promising in animal models to translate to the clinic.
- Translational failure may be explained in part by methodological flaws in animal studies, leading to systematic bias and thereby to inadequate data and incorrect conclusions about efficacy.
- Failures also result because of critical disparities, usually disease specific, between the animal models and the clinical trials testing the treatment strategy.
- Systematic review and meta-analysis of animal studies may aid in the selection of the most promising treatment strategies for clinical trials.
- Publication bias may account for one-third or more of the efficacy reported in systematic reviews of animal stroke studies, and probably also plays a substantial role in the experimental literature for other diseases.
- We provide recommendations for the reporting of aspects of study quality in publications of comparisons of treatment strategies in animal models of disease.
Recommended Citation
Van der Worp, H. B., Howells, D. W., Sena, E. S., Porritt, M. J., Rewell, S., O'Collins, V., & Macleod, M. R. (2010). Can animal models of disease reliably inform human studies?. PLoS medicine, 7(3), e1000245. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000245
Included in
Animal Experimentation and Research Commons, Animal Studies Commons, Design of Experiments and Sample Surveys Commons
Comments
This Research in Translation discusses the following new study published in PLoS Biology:
Sena ES, van der Worp HB, Bath PMW, Howells DW, Macleod MR (2010) Publication bias in reports of animal stroke studies leads to major overstatement of efficacy. PLoS Biol 8(3): e1000344. doi:10.1371/journal. pbio.1000344
Publication bias confounds attempts to use systematic reviews to assess the efficacy of various interventions tested in experiments modeling acute ischemic stroke, leading to a 30% overstatement of efficacy of interventions tested in animals.