The more the merrier? Scoring, statistics and animal welfare in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis.

Experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) is a frequently used animal model for the investigation of autoimmune processes in the central nervous system. As such, EAE is useful for modelling certain aspects of multiple sclerosis, a human autoimmune disease that leads to demyelination and axonal destruction. It is an important tool for investigating pathobiology, identifying drug targets and testing drug candidates. Even though EAE is routinely used in many laboratories and is often part of the routine assessment of knockouts and transgenes, scoring of the disease course has not become standardized in the community, with at least 83 published scoring variants. Varying scales with diffe…