Assessment of Ketamine and Xylazine Cocktail as an Injectable Anesthesia

Used Prior to Laparotomy of Wistar Rats in an Animal Model Study

Yudhistira Pradnyan Kloping and Corinne Prawira Putri

General Practitioner, Airlangga University Graduate, Faculty of Medicine, Airlangga

University, Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia

Corresponding author: Yudhistira Pradnyan Kloping, Medical Faculty of Airlangga

University, Jl. Mayjen. Prof. Dr. Moestopo 47, Surabaya - 60132 Indonesia, phone:
62822572297282, email: distrayyss@gmail.com

Background: Studies utilizing animal models are crucial in the world of medical literature for
basic understanding of diseases to therapeutic regimens development. Certain procedures like
surgical interventions may generate intense pain to the animals. Potential inflicted pain has to
be alleviated or minimized by administering effective anesthetic and analgesic agents to
prevent unethical conflicts or certain hindrances of performing the study itself. In this study,
we aim to evaluate the adequacy of ketamine/xylazine cocktail as an injectable anesthesia for
Wistar rats undergoing laparotomy in an animal model experiment.
Methods: This is a true experimental study with 50 samples consisting of 8-weeks-old male
Wistar rats. Each sample was injected intraperitoneally with a 0.1 ml/100g BW mixture of
ketamine and xylazine taken from a 10 ml cocktail containing 91 mg/ml ketamine and 9.1
mg/ml xylazine. The time required to reach the surgical plane of anesthesia was noted. Before
the laparotomy, each sample’s pedal reflex was examined. The total duration of anesthesia
was also reported. The descriptive frequency analysis was performed using the IBM SPSS
software version 24.0.
Results: The average weight of the samples is 270.86±12.155 gram. On average, the samples
reach the surgical plane of anesthesia in 3.41±0.82 minutes. The mean duration of anesthesia
was 73.54±7.15 minutes. Only 11 samples exhibited positive pedal reflex before the surgery
was performed.
Conclusion: Intraperitoneal Injection of Ketamine/Xylazine cocktail is sufficient to achieve
surgical plane and maintaining anesthesia in addition to analgesia during a major surgery of
Wistar Rats in an animal model study.
Keywords: Anesthesia, Ketamine, Xylazine, laparotomy, animal model, Wistar rats