Transferability of Animal Results To Human Stroke
Although multiple therapies have proven to be effective in animals, only very few have done so in human patients. Reasons for this are (Dirnagl 1999):
- Side effects: Many highly potent neuroprotective drugs display side effects which inhibit the application of effective doses in patients (e.g. MK-801)
- Delay: Whereas in animal studies the time of incidence onset is known and therapy can be started early, patients often present with delay and unclear time of symptom onset
- “Age and associated illnesses: Most experimental studies are conducted on healthy, young animals under rigorously controlled laboratory conditions. However, the typical stroke patient is elderly with numerous risk factors and complicating diseases (for example, diabetes, hypertension and heart diseases)” (Dirnagl 1999)
- Morphological and functional differences between the brain of humans and animals: Although the basic mechanisms of stroke are identical between humans and other mammals, there are differences.
- Evaluation of efficacy: In animals, treatment effects are mostly measured as a reduction of lesion volume, whereas in human studies functional evaluation (which reflects the severity of disabilities) is commonly used. Thus, therapies might reduce the size of the cerebral lesion (found in animals), but not the functional impairment when tested in patients.
Read more about this topic: Animal Models Of Stroke
Famous quotes containing the words animal, results, human and/or stroke:
“... these great improvements of modern times are blessings or curses on us, just in the same ratio as the mental, moral, and religious rule over the animal; or the animal propensities of our nature predominate over the intellectual and moral. The spider elaborates poison from the same flower, in which the bee finds materials out of which she manufactures honey.”
—Harriot K. Hunt (1805–1875)
“There is ... in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!”
—Maria Montessori (1870–1952)
“What education is to the individual man, revelation is to the human race. Education is revelation coming to the individual man, and revelation is education that has come, and is still coming to the human race.”
—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781)
“The stroke of the whip maketh marks in the flesh: but the stroke of the tongue breaketh the bones. Many have fallen by the edge of the sword: but not so many as have fallen by the tongue.”
—Ecclesiasticus Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus, 28:17-8.