Optimizing anesthesia and analgesia for specific research projects

Anesthesia and analgesia have scientific and methodological implications for the design of experiments and the quality of the resulting data. Untreated pain is affecting a magnitude of systems and mechanisms in the body, and anesthesia and analgesia can have significant effects on experimental outcome parameters. The use or omission of certain anesthesia and analgesia protocols has therefore the potential to affect scientific results and increase the variability of data.Pain management includes the choice of anesthesia and analgesia agents, their dose, administration method, duration and frequency of treatment, and a pain-monitoring scheme for each individual animal. Untreated pain or inadequately chosen or insufficiently reported anesthesia or analgesia protocols may carry the potential to leave an animal in pain and distress, and hamper the reproducibility of animal experiments substantially. Respective protocols are therefore an important part of experimental design, and determining an optimal protocol is mandatory when planning animal experiments. In this chapter, we will highlight some important considerations regarding the optimization of pain management in specific animal research projects based on examples from scientific fields with high animal use.