At present, there are many items/checklists used to assess the methodological quality of animal studies. Yet, no tool has been specifically designed for assessing internal validity of animal studies. This articles introduce and interprets SYRCLE's risk of bias tool for animal studies in detail for Chinese scholars to accurately assess the methodological quality of animal studies when they develop systematic reviews on animal studies, so as to provide references for scientific design and implementation of animal studies.
ObjectiveUsing SYRCLE tool (the SYstematic Review Centre for Laboratory animal Experimentation) to evaluate the risk of bias of animal studies in stroke field published in Chinese journals, identify problems of these studies in design, implementation and measurement, in order to provide references for improving the quality of animal studies in China. MethodsWe searched databases including CBM, VIP, CNKI and WanFang Data from inception to December 31st, 2014. Two reviewers independently screened literature, extracted data, and assessed the risk of bias of included animal studies using SYRCLE tool developed by the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research. ResultsA total of 582 studies were included. The assessment results showed that the number of reported items with "Low Risk" in SYRCLE, which have 22 items, reported in >50% of the 4 items and in <30% the 16 items in articles of animals experiments. More than 99% of the studies fulfilled the 3 items and more than 17% of the articles to meet the 10 items while less than 1% of the documents met the 17 items. The quality of studies increased excepted the period of 2010 to 2014. The methodological quality of animal experiments presented a trend of increasing and no significant differences were found in CSCD indexed or not. ConclusionThe methodological quality of animal experiments of stroke is poor in China in terms of the selection bias, implementation bias, measurement bias, withdraw bias and reporting bias.
Objective To systematically review the effectiveness and model building process of heparin treatment for animal model with smoke inhalation injury. Methods Databases including PubMed, EMbase, CBM, CNKI, VIP and WanFang Data were searched to collect animal experiments about the treatment of heparin for animal model with smoke inhalation injury from inception to November 2016. Two reviewers independently screened literature, extracted data and assessed the risk of bias of included studies. Then meta-analysis was conducted by RevMan 5.3 software. Results A total of nine studies involving 11 animal experiments were included. The results showed that building animal model with smoke inhalation injury were through burning of cotton towels or pine sawdust by sheep or rats below 40℃. The results of meta-analysis showed that there was no significant difference in mortality rate between two groups (heparin group vs. control group: RR=0.38, 95%CI 0.14 to 1.05, P=0.06; heparin plus DMSO group vs. DMSO group: RR=0.10, 95%CI 0.01 to 1.51, P=0.10). In addition, the pulmonary artery pressure (MD=–3.31, 95%CI –4.51 to –2.11, P<0.000 01), wet to dry weight ratio (MD=–0.90, 95%CI –1.19 to –0.61, P<0.000 01), and lung water content (MD=–1.18, 95%CI –1.67 to –0.70, P<0.000 01) of the experimental group were lower than those in the control group. PaO2/FiO2 after 12 hours (MD=131.00, 95%CI 59.54 to 202.46, P=0.000 3), PaO2/FiO2 after 24 hours (MD=114.00, 95%CI 60.56 to 167.44, P<0.000 1), PaO2/FiO2 after 48 hours (MD=46.00, 95%CI 20.62 to 71.38, P=0.000 4) were higher than those in the control group. However, there was no significant difference in coagulation function between both groups. Conclusion The current evidence shows that the establishment of animal model of smoke inhalation injury is still lack of standard method. Heparin can decrease pulmonary artery pressure and lung water content in animal models with smoke inhalation injury. Due to the limited quality and quantity of included studies, the above conclusions are still needed to be verified by more high quality studies.
ObjectiveTo evaluate the methodological quality of animal experiments published in high impact journals, in order to provide references for improving the quality of animal experiments.MethodsCSCD and Web of Science databases were electronically searched to collect intervening primordial animal experiments from 2014 to August, 2016. Four reviewers independently screened literatures, extracted data and assessed the methodological quality of included studies by using SYRCLE tool.ResultsA total of 1 999 animal experiments were included. The cited frequency of more than 90% studies were ≤5 times, and of which 52.53% studies were zero. The results of SYRCLE evaluation showed that 54.55% of sub items rated as "low risk" were less than 30%. And 84.62% of them were less than 10%.ConclusionThere are defeet in methodological quality of animal experiments either domestic or abroad. The problems of domestic researches in implementation bias, measurement bias and loss of access bias are particularly obvious. The coincidence rates of "low risk" are much lower than those of abroad studies. Therefore, we suggest that it is necessary to take specific measures to popularize SYRCLE tool to effectively guide the development of animal experiments and improve the design and implementation of animal experiments.