Assessment of quality of life and wellbeing in mouse preclinical research - A scoping review

Abstract

Mouse preclinical research is of great scientific interest to understand the mechanisms of human diseases and test potential therapeutic interventions. Researchers characterize biological and physiological traits, behaviors and disease symptoms using standardized phenotypic protocols in the context of in vivo mouse studies. However, the procedures applied do not always fully translate to reported outcomes in clinical trials. Quality of life (QoL) and wellbeing (WB) are particularly relevant outcomes in human medicine in general, and in neurology in particular, that are routinely measured by patient self-reports but rarely monitored in mouse research. In this novel scoping review, we have identified and described the instruments/tests and outcomes used to assess QoL and WB in recent mouse research (spanning 13 years). We found that WB was stated to be measured more frequently in murine studies (77 publications fulfilled our selection criteria) than QoL (only 13 articles). Instruments measuring WB were commonly used in neurology but less frequently in behavior and psychiatric research articles. Interestingly, we found a high variability of QoL and WB instruments/tests used as well as outcomes measured in the reviewed mouse studies. In addition, among similar parameters tested, we observed variable methodological procedures and mouse sample sizes. Thus, there is a lack of consensus on how to measure QoL and WB in the mouse research field. For ensuring a better translation from mouse to human, outcomes that are important in clinical trials (e.g., QoL and WB) should be measured in mouse studies. Finally, we would like to point out that a proper standardization of QoL and WB assessment protocols, for instance through a modified Delphi consultation survey, should be pursued by the mouse research community.

Review registration: The study was registered on the PROSPERO Database (registration number CRD42018103507).

Keywords: Mice; Quality of life; Scoping review; Translational research; Wellbeing.

Fig. 1

Scoping review flow diagram showing the number of eligible articles used in abstract screening, full text review and data extraction. The reasons for exclusion of the reviewed articles are also depicted.

Fig. 2

Number of included articles by publication year, country and research area in quality of life (QoL) and wellbeing (WB) assessments.

Fig. 3

Number of articles by number of mice used and frequency of strain and sex included in quality of life (QoL) and wellbeing (WB) assessments.

Fig. 4

Violin plots of the number of instruments/tests (A) and outcomes (B) in the articles identified in the review. In the X-axis the number of instruments/tests and outcomes are depicted. The Y-axis shows the frequency distribution of the number of publications (wider sections representing more articles that reported the particular number of instruments/tests or outcomes labelled in the X-axis).