Dissemination of refinements in mouse experimental stroke models to the scientific community.

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In the UK, cerebral stroke is the 3rd cause of death, the leading cause of severe adult disability in adults and costs the NHS an estimated £3 billion per year. The generation of novel and rational therapeutics is essential. Thus, every year thousands of animals are used experimentally to model stroke and investigate potential therapies. Mice are commonly used in experimental studies aimed at modelling stroke not least because they are useful for genetic manipulation studies. However, studies using experimental stroke models tend to show a large variability in the data produced. This usually results in researchers using an increased number of animals per study in order to try and detect a significant difference. We proposed that a large portion of this variability may be due to differences in the anatomy of blood vessels in the brain and an alternative approach, which we have previously developed, reduces the variability seen. Our aim here is to disseminate this refined approach within the scientific community so that other labs performing experimental stroke studies will produce data with reduced variability and therefore reduce the number of animals used in such experiments.