A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIORAL TEST RESULTS FOR AGED MICE

With the increase of human lifespan, age-related diseases have become a non-negligible obstacle that needs to be overcome. An aged mouse is an useful tool for the analysis of age-related diseases and may contributes to the studies toward finding effective treatments for the diseases. However, it could be difficult to obtain an ideal sample size for the analysis of aged mice, as the methods used to increase sample size for aged mice are either time-consuming or costly. Therefore, the analysis might be conducted on a small number of mice or a group of mice with complicated backgrounds. In our study, we conducted analysis on a mouse model of an age-related disease. Mixed ANOVA and linear mixed models were used to analyze longitudinal data collected from aged mice with complex backgrounds. Several observations were made and discussed. In summary, our study reports that certain differences could be detected by the statistical analysis of repeatedly measured data collected from mice with complex backgrounds