Age, weight and decompression sickness in rats

Peter Buzzacott (1) , Michael Theron (1) , Aleksandra Mazur (1) , Qiong Wang (1) , Kate Lambrechts (1) , Ingrid Eftedal (2) , Simin Berenji Ardestani (2) , François Guerrero (1, 3)

1 ORPHY (EA 4324) - Optimisation des régulations physiologiques
2 ISB NTNU - Department of Circulation and Medical Imaging [Trondheim]
3 UBO UFR SSE - Université de Bretagne Occidentale - Faculté des sciences du sport et de l'éducation

Objective: The aim of this study was to determine if, after controlling for weight, age is associated with decompression sickness (DCS) in rats. Methods: Following compression-decompression, male rats aged 11 weeks were observed for DCS. After two weeks recovery surviving rats were re-dived using the same compression-decompression profile. Results: In this experiment there was a clear difference between DCS outcome at ages 11 or 13 weeks in matched rats (p=0.002). Discussion: Even with weight included in the model age was significantly associated with DCS (p=0.01), yet after removal of weight the association was much stronger (p=0.002). Conclusion: We believe that age is likely to be found associated with the probability of DCS in a larger dataset with a wider range of parameters, after accounting for the effect of weight.

Domaines: Physiologie [q-bio.TO]

Peter Buzzacott, Michael Theron, Aleksandra Mazur, Qiong Wang, Kate Lambrechts, et al.. Age, weight and decompression sickness in rats. Archives of Physiology and Biochemistry, 2016, 122 (2), pp.67 - 69. ⟨10.3109/13813455.2016.1140787⟩. ⟨hal-01412101⟩