Despite hormonal changes and effect of these hormones on body metabolism and feed intake, it has been observed that in most of the preclinical studies female mice/rat are used. What justification could be given in this context?
Dear Raghunath:
Could you please cite your source for stating "it has been observed that in most of the preclinical studies female mice/rat are used."
Based on a simple literature search, it is in fact males that dominate preclinical research both in general and when studying metabolic disease. Refer to the attached review, and you will see that the majority of studies that are conducted in this space are dominated by male rodents, most likely to control for hormonal influences on metabolism.
Kind regards,
-Nick
One reason that females have been used more than males for obesity studies is that the body weights of adult female rats and mice plateau, whereas male rats and mice continue gaining weight throughout life. It is often easier to interpret results of a treatment when considered against the stable weights of female controls than against the progressively increasing weights of male controls. if the body weight/obesity studies were first conducted in females, it makes sense to conduct associated metabolic studies in females too.
Since female rats have estrogens they do show a lesser degree of end organ damage. As far as I can think of male rats are used more frequently than female rats. Females are preferred sex in toxicity studies.
Best
HA
I will also support the answer of Nicolas jury that Male rodents are the one which are frequently used for the studies of obesity and that involve weight gain. we can not say just on the basis of a literature survey done by us, it may be the fact that we came through only those papers or relatively in high number in which researchers took female animals.
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