Laboratory animal studies are used in a wide range of human health related research areas, such as basic biomedical research, drug research, experimental surgery and environmental health. The results of these studies can be used, for example, to inform decisions regarding clinical research in humans. If the research question relates to potential harms with no expectation of benefit (e.g. toxicology), studies in experimental animals may provide the only relevant or controlled data and directly inform clinical management decisions.
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are important tools to provide robust and informative evidence summaries of these animal studies. Rating how certain we are about the evidence could provide important information about the translational probability of findings in experimental animal studies to clinical practice and probably improve it. Evidence summaries and certainty in the evidence ratings could also be used (1) to support selection of interventions with best therapeutic potential to be tested in clinical trials, (2) to justify a regulatory decision limiting human exposure (to drug or toxin), or to (3) support decisions on the utility of further animal experiments. The Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) approach is the most widely used framework to rate the certainty in the evidence and strength of health care recommendations. In this article, Carlijn R. Hooijmans and the GRADE Working Group present how the GRADE approach could be used to rate the certainty in the evidence of preclinical animal studies in the context of therapeutic interventions. The authors also discuss the methodological challenges that were identified, and for which further work is needed. Examples are defining the importance of consistency within and across animal species and using GRADE’s indirectness domain as a tool to predict translation from animal models to humans.

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