WIKIMEDIA, RAMAIn 2014, the National Institutes of Health established guidelines for preclinical experimental design—hoping to encourage researchers to adopt best practices, such as randomization and the inclusion of both sexes of lab animals. Yet, in the years preceding and since, the majority of papers published in several cardiovascular journals show a widespread disregard for these standards, according to a recent analysis published in Circulation Research.
“If we’re falling down at this early stage, we have very little hope of having a good translation rate,” said Benjamin Hibbert, a cardiologist and researcher at the University of Ottawa who led the study.
The notable exception to the trend, Hibbert and his colleagues found, was one journal, Stroke, which saw a marked increase in the adherence to best practices following the implementation of a Basic Science Checklist for authors. The checklist, which was introduced in 2011 and updated last year, asks for roughly the same standards as NIH’s guidelines: randomization, blinding, sample size estimation, and explanations of which animals were included, among other expectations.
“It shows that [our] required preclinical checklist for treatment related animal experiments have improved the quality of our preclinical ...
