Canadian Journal of Pure & Applied Sciences

Abstract: Blood is removed from animals for a variety of scientific purposes. As suffering and distress in animals can result in physiological changes which are likely to add another variable to experimental results care should be taken to minimize stress in these laboratory animals as much as possible so that appropriate experimental results could be obtained. Various methods are in use for blood sampling in rodents like tail-clipping, retro-orbital puncture, tail puncture, jugular vein puncture, cardiac puncture, decapitation etc. Vascular cannulations are among the most widely used surgeries in research labs around the world. Cannulation for the repeated blood samples are suitable for use in all strains of rats and can be used to take blood from the femoral artery and vein, carotid artery, jugular vein, vena cava and dorsal aorta. Venous cannulation is said to have advantages which outweigh the arterial cannulation as the former is easier to implant, easier to fill, more likely to maintain patency than the latter. In this respect in addition blood sampling through the jugular catheter offers the advantage that, lost volume can easily be replaced. Thus it is possible to collect sequential samples to evaluate the time course of a response or the acquisition of a larger volume for measurement of hormones which are present at low concentrations in the circulation. Present article is a review with an attempt to provide an elaborate piece of information regarding jugular vein cannulation with precise focus in rats.