A technique for restraining rodents during hindlimb interventions

Recently interest has grown in the skeletal effects of external electrophys ical modalities. To introduce these modalities into the rodent hindlimb, re straining the animals is often necessary. This report describes a novel res traint device that was highly successful when used on 10 Sprague-Dawley rat s for 20 min daily for 6 days each week over a period of 12 weeks. The rest rained animals gained less weight than did 10 cage control animals, suggest ing that animals experienced stress. However, this weight loss was signific ant (p < 0.05) only during the first six weeks, suggesting a degree of accl imatization, Restraint had no observable effect on measures of bone mineral content of the hindlimb, The restraint device we developed restrained anim als without the need for anesthetics, enabling our device to be used in fut ure studies investigating the skeletal effect of external electrophysical m odalities on the rodent hindlimb.