Svenson1 animal documentation

Systolic blood pressure and pulse rate survey in 14 inbred strains of mice   (2004)

Svenson KL, Smith RV




This project is part of the Heart, Lung, Blood and Sleep Disorders Consortium. This page describes protocol for blood pressure and pulse measurement.


Vendor: Mice obtained from The Jackson Laboratory.

Health status report: The Jackson Laboratory Diagnostics Laboratory routinely monitors and documents animal health status using statistically valid sampling procedures and standard protocols.

See JAX®Mice Quality Control Programs or the JAX®Mice Catalog for the list of agents monitored.


Testing period

Diet and Housing: Animals consumed Purina 5K52 food and standard acidified drinking water for the whole project. They were housed in a high health status room from age 7 weeks in Thoren cages (Thoren Maxi Miser #3 cages with a PIV (pressurized individually ventilated) system).

Acclimatization: Animals were housed 5 per cage and acclimatized for 1 to 2 weeks before training and testing.

Testing: At 9 weeks of age the animals were trained daily for one week on the Visitech BP2000 equipment. Blood pressure and pulse were recorded (20 readings daily) using the tail cuff method but these results were labeled "training" and not used for statistical calculations. The next week, the animals were tested daily for one week taking 20 readings each day.

Prior testing: No prior phenotyping was done during this study.

Data reduction: Mean and Standard deviation were calculated for only the "data day" reading taken during the second week of testing (total of 100 reading, 20 per day). Data rejection criteria were:
  • Individual data points were rejected if the Blood pressure was below 40.
  • Individual data points were rejected if the Blood pressure was over 210.
  • Individual data points were rejected if, on any one day, it was outside of 2 standard deviations from the mean.
  • All the data for a day was rejected if there were less than 8 valid readings.
  • Data for a week was not accepted if it did not have at least 3 acceptable days of measurements.