Nonprofit Science Advocacy Group Calls for Retraction of Intimate Partner Violence Study for Which More Than 100 Young Female Animals Were Strangled and Killed

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a national nonprofit medical ethics and health advocacy group of 17,000 physicians, has requested the retraction of a research study published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity for which dozens of adolescent rats were subjected to traumatic brain injuries, inflicted by a metal plate propelled into each animal’s head, then strangled for 90 seconds, and all ultimately killed.

The Australian study, led by Monash University, purported to shed new light on cases of patients who seek medical care at an emergency department within 72 hours of experiencing intimate partner violence-related brain injuries.

In a March 24, 2025, letter to the journal’s editors, Dr. Carol Tavani, a psychiatrist with emergency medicine experience from Newark, Del., and Janine McCarthy, science policy program manager for the Physicians Committee, asked for the study’s retraction for its violation of significant key scientific and ethical principles, including those outlined in the journal’s own guidelines on the ethical and acceptable use of animals in research.

The research was unjustifiable, they wrote, because well-established, evidence-based protocols for diagnosing and managing non-fatal strangulation and traumatic brain injury in humans already exist. However, they said, if further research was deemed warranted, it should have been done using human-specific models.

“The continued presence of this article in the scientific literature legitimizes and encourages the unethical and unscientific use of animals to study intimate partner violence-related brain injury,” the letter says. “By publishing and disseminating research that involves inflicting traumatic brain injury and non-fatal strangulation on animals, the journal risks normalizing such abusive methodologies and providing what will be taken for approval for similar experiments in the future. This not only emboldens the current researchers to continue their harmful studies but also sets a precedent for other investigators to replicate or expand upon these methods under the guise of scientific inquiry.”

“Inducing strangulation and brain injury in animals is not only ethically troubling—it fails to produce scientifically valid insights relevant to human health,” McCarthy said. “The profound physiological and neurological differences between animals and humans make such practices inadequate for understanding the complex effects of brain trauma caused by intimate partner violence. To truly support survivors, research must prioritize human-centered approaches to improve care and advance treatments.”

For the experiment, 109 young female rats were used. Forty-five of the rats received “mild” traumatic brain injuries, which entailed placing them on a board while part of their head was positioned against a “helmet-like metal plate” that propelled a weight into their head. Immediately after, the experimenters strangled the animals using a weighted silicone band, applying pressure about three times the animal’s body weight to their neck while they were restrained. Ten minutes after the injuries, experimenters put all the rats into behavioral experiments. Experimenters then killed all the animals at the study’s conclusion and dissected their brains. The authors concluded that the combination of intimate partner violence and non-fatal strangulation injuries worsens the behavioral deficits, neuropathophysiology, and blood biomarkers in rats.

“Strangling rats and causing concurrent head injuries, then reviving the animals for neurological tests is blatantly cruel,” McCarthy said. “The experimenter’s expressed wish is not simply to answer what they deemed to be a research gap, but to create a whole new line of research using this model.”

Increasingly, it is recognized across research fields that animals are not good surrogates for humans especially when much better human-specific models exist. The vast majority of Americans agree. Over 85% of more than 2,000 respondents polled in September 2024 in a Physicians Committee/Morning Consult survey agreed that animal-based research should be phased out in support of superior methods that do not use animals.

For an interview with Ms. McCarthy, please contact Kim Kilbride at 202-717-8665 or kkilbride [at] pcrm.org (kkilbride[at]pcrm[dot]org).