Abstract
Laboratory Animals Limited (LAL) is a charity that promotes education and training in all the aspects related to the care and welfare of these animals. Laboratory Animals is LAL’s official journal and publishes peer-reviewed original papers and reviews on all aspects of the care and use of animals in research, promoting improvements in the welfare or well-being of the animals used, and research that reduces the number of animals used or replaces animal models with in vitro alternatives.
We introduced case reports as one of the article types that the journal publishes back in 2017 with the aim of providing a place for sharing preliminary data on new or unusual findings related to the practice of laboratory animal medicine. Thus, we defined that case reports must report one of the following:
(a) A new and/or emerging disease; (b) A new association or variation in a disease process; (c) An unreported or unusual adverse drug reaction; (d) An unexpected or unusual presentation of a common problem or an unexpected event in the course of observing or treating an experimental animal that has not been previously reported; (e) Findings that shed new light on the possible pathogenesis of a disease or an adverse effect; (f) A case which could be used as a teaching exercise in deductive reasoning and clinicopathological correlation and/or a practical lesson for the investigation and/or management of similar cases.
When the editorial team assesses a case report the most important consideration for publication is the originality and clinical educational value of the report. This does not mean we will not evaluate the scientific merit of the manuscript, but we will expect these articles to have a more narrative component for an in-depth understanding of the case. The value of case reporting for the laboratory animal veterinarian is manifold and common to the medical and veterinary professions, that is, detecting new diseases, generating hypotheses, pharmacovigilance, high applicability when other research designs are not possible to carry out, allowing emphasis on the narrative aspect (in-depth understanding), and educational value. 1 Most of the times when faced with a new presentation the clinician can only collect data conducing to a proper differential or characterization of the new clinical process.
However, clinical reports have major limitations, such as a lack of ability to generalize, no possibility to establish cause–effect relationship, danger of over-interpretation, publication bias, retrospective design and distraction of reader when focusing on the unusual. 1
We want Laboratory Animals to play a more relevant role in the education and training of laboratory animal veterinarians in Europe by publishing case reports that are meaningful and relevant to the laboratory animal veterinarian. Twenty-first century laboratory animal medicine should be moving, as Steven M Niemi pointed out almost a decade ago, 2 in the direction of treating patients, not reagents with ‘use by’ dates.