Animal Experimentation

One of the tests that has recently come out for reducing animals in testing. It is used to test the oral toxicity of animals. In this procedure, the number of rats used is reduced. This is a test that can be used in place of the LD50 test.

As oppossed to the LD50 test, which gives doses to a bunch of animals all at the same time, the up and down gives doses to one animal at a time. If the animal dies, the dose for the next animal is decreased. however, if they do not die, the dose is increased. This greatly reduces the number of animals used because it sees the results of the first test animal and then goes off of that. In the LD50 test, the testers will go off of results from a whole batch of animals that were tested and killed. The next time they want to do another test, they use a whole other batch of animals instead of just one, like the up and down.

"The procedure has been tested, by simulation, on 10 of the survey studies. It produced excellent agreement with the original studies. The 95% confidence interval for the LD50 averaged ±32% by the up-and-down method, compared with ±15% for conventional studies using 40 to 50 animals”. For those of you who do not speak statistics, basically this means that this test produced just as accurate results as other tests and still used less animals.