Within the inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) research community, histological scoring of colitis is an important grading system to determine colitis severity in pre-clinical mouse models of IBD. However, there is currently no set standard for grading the severity of colitis in mouse models. There are currently 30 types of scoring systems within the IBD research community. In this paper, we propose a simple, 4-characteristic scoring equation based on one of the most popular scoring systems in the community to streamline and advance the research on pre-clinical models of colitis. Using multiple linear regression, we found that 4 of 8 canonical characteristics of colitis are particularly significant to produce a simplified model equation with a fit of R2 = 0.908. Upon testing, this model appears to fare well within both non-ulcerative and ulcerative mouse models of colitis as a severity scoring system of colitis. The Boone–Mayer Scoring System appears to be a sound proposal for standardizing scoring severity of murine models of IBD across pre-clinical IBD laboratories. Link to website can be found here: https://sites.nd.edu/lauren-mayer/ .
Mayer et al. (Sun,) studied this question.
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