TY - JOUR T1 - Major anxiety-related interventions in rodent defense behaviors: systematic review and meta-analyses JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/020701 SP - 020701 AU - Farhan Mohammad AU - Joses Ho AU - Adam Claridge-Chang Y1 - 2015/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/06/10/020701.abstract N2 - Assays measuring defense behavior assays in rodents, including the elevated plus maze, open field and light-dark box assays, have been widely used in preclinical models of anxiety to study the ability of therapeutic interventions to modulate the anxiety-like state. However, many important proposed anxiety-modulating factors, including genes, drugs and stressors have had paradoxical effects in different rodent studies. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature on the effect of aimed to evaluate whether some supposed anxiety-targeted interventions actually had only trivial effects on rodent defense behaviors. Using PubMed search phrases to identify articles, a systematic review was conducted on a panel of anxiety-linked factors: 5-HT1A receptor, SERT, pain, restraint, social isolation, corticotropin-releasing hormone and Crhr1. Articles were included if they contained rodent defense behavior data for one of the anxiety interventions. Systematic meta-analyses were conducted for interventions with fifteen or fewer studies; randomly sampled meta-analyses of fifteen studies were conducted for interventions for which more than fifteen studies were available. Synthesis of the data was performed using random effects models of Hedges’ g. Publication bias was found to affect several literatures. Surprisingly, three of the ten purported anxiety-related interventions had small and/or non-statistically significant effects. The literature supports seven of the ten factors as being strongly connected to anxiety-related behavior. ER -