Why Do Medical Researchers Use Mice?

Question

Answer 1

Mice are often the subject of many medical research such as Hypertension, diabetes, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, HIV and AIDs, heart disease, spinal cord injuries. There are many reasons for doing so, firstly for convenience as mice are easily available and do not have much maintenance costs. They have a life span of two to three years and reproduce throughout the year an average female mouse can give birth to up to five litters of offspring a year. This gives researchers a large number of subjects to perform experiments.

Another extremely key reason for medical researchers to use mice is due to their genetic composition(80 percent of their genes are shared with those of human beings) and behavioural traits and other similarities such as similar bodily processes as human beings like ageing, similar immune responses to infections, cardiovascular system and blood cell production . Their endocrine systems which produce hormones are very similar to the human endocrine system and they are able to have genome sequencing like humans, this means that the order of the four bases—adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine can be determined in a strand of DNA.

Answer 2

Medical researchers rely on mice and rats for several reasons:

• Convenience: rodents are small, easily maintained, and easy to adapt to new environment. They also reproduce quickly with short lifespan (two to three years), so several generations of mice can be observed in a relatively short period of time.
• Economical: Mice and Rats are relatively inexpensive and can be bought in large quantities.
• Genetically Identical: Most of the mice and rats used in medical trials are inbred so that, they are almost identical genetically. This helps make the results of medical trials more uniform.
• Similarity to Human: Many symptoms of human conditions can be replicated in mice and rats.