| Comments |
"Drug or vaccine formulations are often given to experimental
animals by oral gavage. Consequently, the volume of the
stomach is considered an important parameter for oral dosing,
and the results are shown in Table 2. The mouse stomach was
approximately one-tenth the volume of the rat stomach.
Wolfensohn & Lloyd (1994) have suggested the upper limit
for oral dosing in mice to be 20mL kg-1. Thus, for a mouse of
20 g, the maximum oral dosage volume would be 0.4mL. For
rats, the recommended maximum is 10 mL kg-1 for a 200 g
rat this would give a dosing volume of 2mL. These values
correlate to some degree with the ‘comfortably full’ volumes
shown in Table 2, despite the fact that post-mortem results
would be likely to differ from an in-vivo situation, since
elasticity and responsiveness of gastric tissue to pressure may
be altered." |