The rodents can be used to develop cough syrups, other similar medicines

Apr 1, 2013 08:20 GMT  ·  By

A team of scientists working with the Guangzhou Medical College in China have recently gone public with the news that, according to their experiments, mice are perfectly capable of coughing. As some would put it, this goes to show that they are not all that different from us.

Now that this centuries-long mystery has finally been solved, the scientific community can rest assured that these rodents can successfully be used in order to test the efficiency of newly developed cough syrups and other similar medicines.

By the looks of it, cough treatments are, for the time being at least, tested on animals such as guinea pigs.

However, they are a tad more expensive to keep as laboratory animals than mice are, which is why scientists researching cough medicine would very much prefer working with the latter.

Times of India reports that, in order to test whether or not mice can cough, said team of scientists compelled the animals to breathe in a mist made up of capsaicin (i.e. the molecule responsible for the spiciness of chili peppers).

After that, the mice were kept a close eye on, and the changes in their body volume were closely monitored.

Mini-microphones were also used in order to pin down whatever sounds that these rodents produced following their being exposed to capsaicin.

Apart from their producing noises commonly associated with sniffing, scratching and tapping on their teeth, these mice produced several explosive sounds, which the researchers believe were clear indicators of coughing.

More so given the fact that these explosive noised were accompanied by head movements, opened mouths and abdominal jerking, the same source informs us.

Wishing to test their theory that the mice were indeed coughing, the researchers gave them suppressants and watched as the rodents stopped displaying this particular type of behavior.

The researchers now wish to find out whether or not mice can cough voluntarily, or if their coughing behavior can only come as an involuntary respond to external stimuli.