Why are rats frequently used in drug research?
965087
Rats are readily available from supply companies, comparatively easy to care for, and available in uniform lines.\n\nInitial animal testing of drugs is often done in rats.  As mammals, they do have many biological processes in common with humans, and to a certain extent lessons learned in animal testing can be extrapolated to people.\n\nSometimes a researcher is studying treatments for specific disease.  Rats populations are available with certain inherited traits, so a researcher can obtain 100 or 1000 rats with a certain genetic defect.  The more uniform genetically the rats are, the more certain the researcher can be that differences in treatment are responsible for any observed outcomes rather than attributing it to variations in the tested populations.\n\nRats are small, and can be cared for in cages with much less effort than larger animals.  This cuts down on some of the costs of performing research.
185102
You need to admistrate the drug to the patients. You need to have a control group, which will have a sugar pill and the experimental group which will have the actual pill. Depending on drug and conditions, you need to use a single-blind or a double-blind technique to do the research. Then examine the patients look for the side effects, long term problems that the drug is causing vs the gain of the drug, process of healing, relative speed of healing process and so on. But it is not as easy as it sounds in the real life and it costs millions of dollars to do that kind of experiments with drugs. You also need FDA approval for the experiment of calculating the risk-benefit ratio.
193096
Yes, it depends on the what you are researching, if its animal testing then you need to consider the animal's rights, if it deals with testing drugs using patients - then you need to consider side effects and such and various legality measures for those who get involved with the study.\n\nIf you are studying or using some other researchers material or mechansim, you need to get authorisation for use of that especially if its a copyright material. If its public material - referencing this study may be sufficient.\n\nAlso the way you deal with outliers in your study, and also you need to set out your assumptions. If these are not reasonable and you proceed with a conclusion - this can be misleading to readers - as such be unethical behaviour.
735511
Lack of funding and public lack of interest in medicine not to mention public fear of the scientists' mental states caused the lack of volunteers to test the new vaccines. People today still fear being lab rats, even with the advanced technologies and medicines and safety precautions and procedures. Imagine how terrifying it would have been to be a human lab rat in the early 1900's without all of those precautions...
1059393
Yes, see below. They test it in environments to see if it adversely affects animals.\n\nI think there are better ways than to test it on/around critters...but I cannot be certain. I have sited all of my sources below. This does indicate that we subject critters to these chemicals before finding out if they are safe. Hence my answer, Yes!\n\nAs quoted;\nHazard to Humans and Domestic Animals are assessed by using a variety of acute, subchronic, and chronic toxicity tests.\n\n(Ie. Ignore the old hippie. Isn't it annoying when ppl respond and don't know what they are talking about?)
680954
It allows people to see the internal structures of animals to help them gain an understanding of the human body and its functions (in a school environment) BUT...this same thing could be accomplished with a very graphically intense computer simulation as well.\n\nIn medical research it allows researchers to determine how diseases function, how to stop them, what impact various things have on living tissue, etc.
434688
Why don't the makers of high dosage vitamin therapy conduct more randomly assigned, double blind studies and advertise more?  Its about money, exposure, and research.  There is more empirical evidence supporting medications over vitamins and its more publicized.
439212
Every drug reacts differently and there are many chemical reactions.\n\nThe most common method a drug uses though is to inhibit an enzyme that is causing the anomaly.  It does this by binding to a "pocket" in the enzyme, most typically by ionic interactions.  These are either in the form of hydrogen bonding, pi-pi stacking etc.  These drugs are VERY specific and out of the thousands of different enzymes in your body they will target the right one.  Most commonly due to the new ionic interactions it causes the enzyme to change shape and deform very slightly, which means it cannot combine with another enzyme to promote the disease, or bind specifically to another molecule in your body which would otherwise promote the disease.\n\nThe reasons for drugs are several fold:\n\n1.  They are there to help initiate an enzyme-enzyme interaction that should occur naturally, but isn't;\n2.  They are used to bind to a rogue enzyme which is causing problems, deform the shape and de-activate it, letting your body carry on as normal;\n3.  They take over part of the bodies process and actually are a synthetic replacement for something that does occur naturally, but isn't functioning properly.\n\nHow individual drugs work is very specific usually to the ailment, so it is difficult to provide general chemical reactions.\n\nI hope this brief explanation marginally helps.
822229
All medications are chemicals. Many of them have more side effects than they have actions on the medical conditions they were prescribed to alleviate. Because of litigation, no drug manufacturer deliberately produces a dangerous medication. It simply happens because the FDA cannot test long enough.
784426
I believe that testing on animals for medical reasons is an unfortunate necessity. We all want advances in science to cure terrible diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Cancer, HIV etc, and without the use of animals for this purpose we will never be able to achieve this.\nAnimal testing will continue until a new model could be found. The use of Cell and Tissue culture is used for drug testing, but medicinal drugs are not allowed on the market until animal testing has been completed. This is then backed up with human testing once the drug is deemed safe. This does fail, and people can get hurt (eg thalidomide) but without the animal testing these cases would occur more frequently. \nAlso laboratories for testing on animals have to work to highly stringent guidelines, and are frequently checked by officials that the animals are not being mistreated. In the UK at least.
847581
I work with experimental mice and we have a variety of colours, including black, brown, tan, black with tan bellies, grey and even nude and thats just in the room I look after! The colouration is dependent upon the strain and what they are testing. We have one strain that are a knock-out (knocks out a particular gene expression) where we get offspring from black parents that are white, black, grey and brown! If you are talking about just "typical" lab research for students at school, they would use mice that are accessable and it could be that this was simply the available stock. Additionally, it is easier to take blood samples from the tail vein of a white mouse than a dark one, so students would probably be trained with white animals.\nThe reason you think that only white rats/mice are used is that is what the media portrays. It is the same thing as everyone thinking that all research requires pipetting - have you noticed that whenever there is a story about medical research they always show someone pipetting? This isnt the case at all! It could also be that old video's use a lot of albino animals.\nHope this helps!
816190
This is for your next dance party, especially if you're taking your pet rat. Researchers in Sydney have tried – in rats - to see what happens when you give them ecstasy with other drugs.\n\nAlthough ecstasy is an amphetamine, people still take it along with methamphetamine – one of whose names is Ice. Methamphetamine can cause dependence and even psychosis and people have been known to buy what they thought were ecstasy tablets but actually contained methamphetamine.\n\nRats given both ecstasy and methamphetamine were more likely to develop a high body temperature – a serious side effect of ecstasy. The rats' brains were also more depleted of a brain transmitter called serotonin.\n\nThe researchers also gave the rats ecstasy plus THC - a chemical in cannabis. They found that when ecstasy was combined with very high doses of THC, the rise in temperature was lower as was the reduction in brain serotonin. But the doses were much higher than normal use.\n\nThe questions are whether these findings are applicable to humans.\n\nGiven the risks with methamphetamine and not knowing what's in a tablet, the safest option is to get your kicks another way. Like an evening in front of the tellie with a cup of tea. Just the job for adolescents eh?
1135041
it depends on how old you are. i think if your in your teens its fine to experiment but i see many of my older friends who have done drugs there whole life and they look awful. these people were beautiful when they were younger but the drugs have caused physical damage.drugs also kill brain cells.
176899
Depends on what standards for ethics you set. If by unethical you mean things like killing babies or ripping out beating hearts from conscious patients, you are unlikely to succeeed. If, on the other hand, you require stuides to be compliant with the Helsinki declaration, then ALL studies that do not conform are "unethical". I'm just saying this because MANY studies from smaller or less developed countries are based on inadequate ethical grounds (for technical or economical reasons). In that sense, you don't want a clear fraud, like those mentioned by the above posters but any article with sub-standard research (many of those around). \n\nAn obvious example would be the comparison of a new treatment with placebo when a standard treatment is already available. No patient should be denied standard treatment (if it exists) and using placebo is ethically dubious. Such comparisons should always be made between "new" and "old" drug, not with placebo.\n\nI would suggest searching "pubmed" for research reported before 1990 in lesser known journals. "Unethical" research should be quite easy to find...
502947
Scientists do. They may work for a pharmaceutical company, government or on their own. They test it on lab animals until they can prove that they have enough justification to start testing on humans. Then they have to get it approved for testing by the FDA.
259402
It's the science of treating medical conditions with the use of drugs.  (As opposed to surgery or psychotherapy or physical therapy...)
294210
I think that you need a lot of answers to this. I am also against the use of animals in trials. I aggree with the previous answerer that it is sad and I will add that it is also scarring the purpose they are using them for.\n\nKaterina