A Simple Appliance for Evaluating the Exercise Ability of a Small Animal

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to reduce cost and development time in drug efficacy evaluation. A diagnostic technique and simple equipment were needed with which to quantitatively evaluate the health of a small animal. The study consisted of two steps: development and optimization of equipment for evaluating the animal's exercise ability, followed by evaluation of the exercise ability using the MT system. In obtaining the necessary diagnostic data, variations caused by disturbances other than the health of the animal were suppressed before the MT system evaluation was carried out. The original plan was to compare data taken under normal health conditions with data taken under abnormal health conditions induced by temperature changes, to which small animals are sensitive, but the animal expired before the required amount of normal condition data could be obtained and the diagnosis had to be carried out with the reduced amount of data available. Although it was not possible to obtain data under the planned abnormal conditions, data obtained on the day before the animal,s demise were used as data representing an abnormal condition and an analysis was performed by the RT method. The results led to the conclusion that the health of a small animal can be diagnosed from a small amount of data obtained with simple equipment.