Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Dietrich, Tamara
• Aigner, Annette
• Hildebrandt, Alexander
• Weber, Jérôme
• Meyer Günderoth, Mara
• Hohlbaum, Katharina
• Keller, Johannes
• Tsitsilonis, Serafeim
• Maleitzke, Tazio

Titel

Nesting behavior is associated with body weight and grip strength loss in mice suffering from experimental arthritis

Ist Teil von

• Scientific reports, 2023-12, Vol.13 (1), p.23087-23087, Article 23087

Ort / Verlag

England: Nature Publishing Group

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Objective animal health evaluation is essential to determine welfare and discomfort in preclinical in vivo research. Body condition scores, body weight, and grimace scales are commonly used to evaluate well-being in murine rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and osteoarthritis experiments. However, nest-building, a natural behavior in mice, has not yet been evaluated in wild type (WT) or genetically modified rodents suffering from collagen antibody-induced arthritis (CAIA). To address this, we analyzed nesting behavior in WT mice, calcitonin gene-related peptide alpha-deficient (αCGRP ) mice, and calcitonin receptor-deficient (Calcr ) mice suffering from experimental RA compared to healthy control (CTRL) groups of the same genotypes. CAIA was induced in 10-12-week-old male mice, and clinical parameters (body weight, grip strength, clinical arthritis score, ankle size) as well as nesting behavior were assessed over 10 or 48 days. A slight positive association between the nest score and body weight and grip strength was found for animals suffering from CAIA. For the clinical arthritis score and ankle size, no significant associations were observed. Mixed model analyses confirmed these associations. This study demonstrates that clinical effects of RA, such as loss of body weight and grip strength, might negatively affect nesting behavior in mice. Assessing nesting behavior in mice with arthritis could be an additional, non-invasive and thus valuable health parameter in future experiments to monitor welfare and discomfort in mice. During severe disease stages, pre-formed nest-building material may be provided to animals suffering from arthritis.