How to calculate sample size in animal studies?

作者：Jaykaran Charan, N. D. Kantharia · 发表于：Journal of Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapeutics · 年份：2013 · DOI：10.4103/0976-500x.119726 · 被引用次数：1915 · 研究领域：Animal testing and alternatives、Computational Drug Discovery Methods

Calculation of sample size is one of the important component of design of any research including animal studies.If a researcher select less number of animals it may lead to missing of any significant difference even if it exist in population and if more number of animals selected then it may lead to unnecessary wastage of resources and may lead to ethical issues.In this article, on the basis of review of literature done by us we suggested few methods of sample size calculations for animal studies. Key words: Alpha error, animal studies, power, sample sizeHow many animals I should use for my study?This is one of the most confusing questions faced by a researcher.Too small sample size can miss the real effect in experiment and too large sample size will lead to unnecessary wasting of the resources and animals.[1] Issue of sample size has been highlighted adequately for the clinical trials and clinical studies, but not explored much in the case of animal studies in published literature.It is very important to teach young researchers and post-graduate students regarding importance and methods of sample size calculation.To clarify this issue of sample size in animal studies, we decided to search various articles available regarding the sample size in animal studies.We did PubMed search by using various MeSH terms such as "sample size," "sample size calculations," "animal studies" etc., and their combinations.We have also searched various articles through Google and Google Scholar....