Impact of venipuncture on physiological research conducted in conscious macaques

A survey of 397 publications dealing with macaques was conducted. Stress-sensitive physiological data collected during venipuncture were evaluated in 58 reports. Despite of the fact that venipuncture often is a stressful event for research animals, 81% of the studies did not account for this circumstance by providing no information as to how the subjects were caught and how they were immobilized during venipuncture. Common practices suggest that the animals were physically restrained with squeeze-backs or forced with fear-inducing techniques to leave their home areas and enter a transport cage in most of these studies, and that they experienced additional stress, triggered by manual or mechanical immobilization during actual venipuncture. It was concluded that the description of the experimental animal's handling prior to and during venipuncture is a methodological issue which needs to be clarified in order to account for a dependent possibly data-biasing variable. It was recommended that experimental animals should be trained to cooperate during inhomecage venipuncture whenever stress-sensitive blood parameters are examined.