Pain Management in Animals

A special issue of Animals (ISSN 2076-2615). This special issue belongs to the section "Animal Welfare".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 September 2019) | Viewed by 5472

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Pathobiology, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada
Interests: diseases of laboratory animals; toxicologic pathology; research animal anesthesia; analgesia; euthanasia; animal welfare
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Département de Sciences Cliniques, University of Montreal, Montreal, PQ, Canada
Interests: pain assessment; anaesthesiology; veterinary medicine; general anesthesia; intravenous infusions

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The recognition and effective management of pain in animals are integral for ensuring good welfare in all fields of veterinary medicine, as well as when managing animals for production, in zoos, when caring for research animals, and when managing wildlife. Most veterinary practitioners, animal producers, caretakers, and researchers are keen to ensure that animals are provided with appropriate pain management to minimize suffering and distress. Despite this, there are many challenges that practitioners and others face when trying to provide appropriate analgesia to animals in their care, including insufficient recognition of pain in animals; a lack of validated pain scoring methods for various animal species; concerns regarding potential diversion of potent narcotic analgesic agents; inability to access efficacious analgesic treatments; unknown safety, efficacy, dosage, and withdrawal time of analgesic agents for many animal species, including food animals; lack of client compliance in administering pain-relieving medications to animals; an inability to access some animals to manage pain effectively; and potential adverse effects resulting from therapeutics used for acute and chronic pain management in animals.

Original manuscripts that address any aspect of pain management in animals are invited for this Special Issue. Topics of special interest include the assessment of novel therapeutics for clinical pain management in animals; the management of chronic pain in animals; the treatment of painful conditions in food animals; ethical responsibilities for pain management in animals; research approaches to validate pain scoring in animals; causes of under-recognition of pain in animals; and pain management in less-studied species, such as fish, reptiles, amphibia, and birds.

Prof. Patricia V. Turner
Dr. Daniel Pang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Animals is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • pain assessment
  • veterinary medicine
  • nalgesia
  • pioid analgesics
  • SAIDs
  • ocal anesthetics
  • animal welfare
  • chronic pain

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

12 pages, 1033 KiB  
Article
Use of the Rat Grimace Scale to Evaluate Visceral Pain in a Model of Chemotherapy-Induced Mucositis
by Rebecca P. George, Gordon S. Howarth and Alexandra L. Whittaker
Animals 2019, 9(9), 678; https://doi.org/10.3390/ani9090678 - 12 Sep 2019
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 4885
Abstract
The rat grimace scale (RGS) is a measure of spontaneous pain that evaluates pain response. The ability to characterize pain through a non-invasive method has considerable utility for numerous animal models of disease, including mucositis, a painful, self-limiting side-effect of chemotherapy treatment. Preclinical [...] Read more.
The rat grimace scale (RGS) is a measure of spontaneous pain that evaluates pain response. The ability to characterize pain through a non-invasive method has considerable utility for numerous animal models of disease, including mucositis, a painful, self-limiting side-effect of chemotherapy treatment. Preclinical studies investigating novel therapeutics for mucositis often focus on pathological outcomes and disease severity. These investigations fail to measure pain, in spite of reduction of pain being a key clinical therapeutic goal. This study assessed the utility of the RGS for pain assessment in a rat model of mucositis, and whether changes in disease activity index (DAI) and open field test (OFT) reflected the grimace responses recorded. Sixty tumor-bearing female Dark Agouti rats were injected with either saline or 5-Fluourouracil alone, or with co-administration of opioid analgesics. Whilst differences in DAI were observed between treatment groups, no difference in RGS scores or OFT were demonstrated. Significant increases in grimace scores were observed across time. However, whilst a statistically significant change may have been noted, the biological relevance is questionable in terms of practical usage, since an observer is only able to score whole numbers. Development of effective pain assessment methods in animal models is required to improve welfare, satisfy regulatory requirements, and increase translational validity of the model to human patients. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Pain Management in Animals)
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