You're daily reminder: the spiny mouse
- Jamie Sorenson
- May 4
- 2 min read
You're daily reminder that studying female rats and mice is not specific enough because they do not menstruate the way women do! In fact, only 2% of animals menstruate as we do. We would be much better served by studies being done on the spiny mouse (which actually does menstruate like us!).
Just saying… it’s a completely different evolutionary arm… so hop on it and study female spiny mice please!
I’m literally one of the first people to do research in female rats in the country. That’s not really to brag, I find this quite abhorrent. I honestly could not have even imagined that my small lab in college was one of the first to “take the risk” of evaluating neuroscience and anxiety in females, but thank you to my wonderful mentor for doing this. It just has always seemed obvious to me that we would research women and I did not realize until 20 years later that what we were doing was unusual.
Btw my research study was to prove that PMS existed in females rats and I failed!!! Why? Maybe because they literally don’t menstruate the way we do! If we had taken the time or resources to study spiny mice instead, I bet our results would have been greatly impacted. Also, I remember being 20 years old and thinking, "what do you mean PMS hasn't been proven yet? I can prove it to you this Tuesday..."
I really cringe when I think about this. We don’t need to study the spiny mouse for all female research, but there is so much research that’s been done on female rats and mice that may not even be helpful to the human race. It hurts my heart because we justify sacrificing these animals for advancement of humankind, but if no advancement is made, that sacrifice is in vain.
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