• Question: is it possible for animal to have dementia and mental disorder like humans

    Asked by sumigrg1994 to Ben, James, Jen, Michael, Susanna on 11 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by sessess.
    • Photo: Ben Brilot

      Ben Brilot answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      Well the answer is both yes and maybe. ‘Yes’ because some scientists study how to treat mental health disorders in rats and mice with drugs. So obviously those rats and mice have to have a disorder that looks like dementia before they can start trying to treat it.

      The ‘maybe’ is because other people would argue that a mental disorder in an animal isn’t the same as it is for us: they would say that depression in a rat doesn’t really feel bad to the rat, not like it does for a human.

      I’m on the side of other scientists trying to show that even if we don’t know that the mental disorder is distressing for the animal, maybe if it looks enough like a mental health disorder we should give the animal the benefit of the doubt that they’d rather have better mental health.

    • Photo: Jen Todd Jones

      Jen Todd Jones answered on 19 Mar 2013:

      Hi sumigrg

      Like Ben said the idea is that we study the brain of animals like rats and cats and use the results of the experiments to estimate what might happen in a human brain with the same problem. This can be difficult since our brains are so much more complicated than their brains, but it is sometimes the best, most ethical way of testing these disorders – it might seem cruel to test animals, but the alternative is a much slowed progress towards understanding and treating human illnesses, and we can’t test ourselves because of systems of ethics put in place to protect humans!

      Jen

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