Plant derived extracts in the neuroscience of anxiety on animal models: biases and comments

Abstract Generalised anxiety disorders probably represent one of the world biggest mental health problem. A large number of studies have also shown that anxiety disorders and depression are often associated with quality of life impairments. As anxiety represents a big concern in public health, a substantial literature supports clinically important associations between psychiatric illness and chronic medical conditions. Actually, most research focuses on depression, finding that depression can adversely affect self-care and increase the risk of incident medical illness, complications and mortality. Anxiety disorders are less well studied, but robust epidemiological and clinical evidence shows that they play an equally important role. Recent reported articles have raised a debate about the effectiveness of some plant-derived extracts in anxiety-like models in mice. Biases about several aspects related with experimental setting, animal selection, environments, operators and investigators, selection and performance of behavioral tests, controls, results managing and statistics are here discussed.