| Popis: |
Dear Dr. Nunamaker and Dr. ReynoldsWe have read with interest your recent paper published in PlosOne where you demonstrated how poor the reporting is in oncology preclinical studies [1]. After selecting 400 articles published during 2020 in 20 oncology-related journals that explicitly endorsed the ARRIVE guidelines - a 20-item checklist to improve animal studies reporting - you found just 23% of compliance with five key domains (ethical oversight assurance, animal signalment, animal husbandry, welfare, and euthanasia) [2]. That’s unfortunate, way below acceptable, and not novel. Still, it’s highly important to show how bad the portrait is today. The ARRIVE guidelines were first launched in 2010 [3] but they didn’t stick as they should and poor reporting performance of preclinical studies has persisted in several fields [4–6]. Among the worst reported items is euthanasia and, as pointed out by you, only 14% of the articles fully described the procedure. Before you, Abbas et. al also found only 14% of the articles with tissue engineering approaches for urethral repair properly described the euthanasia methodology [4] and Reynolds et. al showed that 52% of the articles published in Shock journal did it properly [7]. A detailed description of the euthanasia methods is often underestimated by researchers but has huge consequences for the validity and interpretation of the outcomes. Ignoring the variation in the chosen shift, duration, and most importantly, anesthetics employed for euthanasia can simply make the results ungeneralizable. We have investigated the impact of anesthetics in a systematic review and meta-analysis [8] and we noticed that:i) the interference of a given anesthetic is not constant across several biological pathways;ii) the degree of interference in a given pathway differs according to the anesthetic employed;iii) the anesthetic dose has a wide variation across studies;iv) the confirmatory euthanasia method (i.e. overdose, decapitation, bleeding after organ harvesting) may be a confounding factor. It’s noteworthy that these interferences do not justify their abrogation. We must bear in mind that animal killing methods must comply with the ability to cause a rapid loss of consciousness and death with minimum distress, fear, or pain in the animals. Thus, using anesthetics right before euthanasia is meant to achieve these goals. Instead of abrogation, we should develop standards and, while these standards are lacking, we should, at least, describe the procedure in detail. That’s the researcher's burden. However, we cannot forget the publisher's part in this lack of adherence to good standards. Nunamaker and Reynolds chose just journals that endorse the ARRIVE guidelines. Why didn’t the editors and reviewers enforce the journal policies? It seems to be another demonstration that scientific publishers have not been working just for the advancement of science. |
