By Tara Haelle
A previous tip sheet provided five things to think about before you decide to cover an animal study. But those aren’t the only considerations. Here are five more from the same crowd-sourced social media post that will help you determine whether it’s a good idea to cover the study and what to keep in mind as you do.
6. About those animal studies in behavioral and/or psychiatric research …
That brings us to the challenge of writing about studies that rely on observation of an animal’s behavior for the sake of better understanding ADHD, autism, schizophrenia, depression and other neurological, developmental or psychiatric conditions and disabilities. “I am most hesitant to cover an animal story that involves mental illness,” said journalist Erin Hare. “The behavioral tests for mental illness in animals are still in the dark ages.”
No biomarkers exist for almost any of these conditions (with a quasi-exception for genetic findings related to schizophrenia and bipolar disorders). It’s not possible to know a rat actually has “ADHD” (if that’s even possible); it’s only possible to observe hyperactivity and infer that there may be overlapping biological mechanisms to human hyperactivity. Similarly, an apparently anti-social mouse doesn’t mean it has autistic characteristics or anti-social personality disorder. Be very, very, very cautious about extrapolating brain-related findings from animal studies to humans. It’s far too easy to anthropomorphize animals when a researcher talks about rats being “depressed” or “autistic.”
7. Are you expressly showing the difference between humans and animals?
“For features, I don’t mind including animal studies since there’s usually room to get into the difference between people and animals,” said writer Jyoti Madhusoodanan. Such stories can again help readers understand both the value and limitations of animal research. Madhusoodanan said she always asks outside sources “how relevant the model is to whatever is being studied,” and if it’s only partly relevant, she says so in the story. She also holds animal studies to a much higher level of scientific and statistical rigor than other studies, something multiple journalists mentioned.
8. Are animals the only way to study something?
“There are a lot of studies where animals are the best we’ll ever get,” Jansen said. “For example, animal studies might define a region of the brain that is important for behavior through mutations and genetic engineering.” Science journalist Rina Shaukh-Lesko also considers covering animal studies “when it’s an important health issue, but the ethics make it impossible to study some of the basic science in humans, which means the only information we have is from animals.”
These studies are often in neuroscience or environmental health studies, such as exposing one group of animals to excessive air pollution or cigarette smoke and comparing health outcomes to the control group. These kinds of studies, after all, are how scientists were able to understand precisely how alcohol during pregnancy causes severe birth defects and neurological problems.
Even then, however, Rina said would want to see evidence that the scientists at least tried to see similar findings in humans or in human tissue or cells.
9. Are you explicitly writing about a treatment derived from an animal or the intersection of humans and animals?
Science journalist and author Christie Wilcox, Ph.D. tends to write more about animals than human health, but she also writes a lot about venom. “The only time I cover human health is in relation to toxins, and for obvious reasons, studies on how toxins kill and how to treat them are overwhelmingly conducted in animals,” she said. So she will cover studies that explain venom activities, model pathophysiology, examine new antivenoms and so forth, but she remains skeptical about studies claiming a new painkiller from a certain venom or about any studies using an animal to model a human disease to find a “cure.”
10. Whatever you do, make sure the study is highly rigorous, actually important and valuable for people to read about.
Freelance science journalist Robin Lloyd said the consumer media should rarely cover mouse studies, but if they do, the study “should be rigorous, breakthrough and have some validation in humans, and the story should be multi-sourced story and offer no false hope.” She provided examples: “If scientists clone a mouse, we should cover it” since it has “huge implications for humans and beyond. If scientists create a transgenic mouse that can’t get diabetes, we should cover it.”
Be sure that the scientists have also chosen the right kind of lab models since nearly all models are bred with certain characteristics. What kind of mice were used and why? Are they more prone to a condition than a normal wild mouse? And were the conditions the animals were kept in appropriate for the study in terms of temperature, chemical exposures in food or feeding bowls or cages, etc.? It was some of these flaws that sunk the Seralini study.
