Comparing apples and oranges and pears and kumquats: The misuse of index systems for processing histopathology data in fish toxicological bioassays

Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry
Jeffrey C Wolf

Abstract

Histopathology index systems involve the application of weighted scores to various diagnostic findings for the purpose of calculating overall organ and/or whole-animal health measurements. Such systems were originally developed as tools for monitoring the general health of fish populations. More recently, index systems have been applied to hypothesis-based toxicological studies, the goal of which is to investigate whether a cause-and-effect relationship exists between exposure to a particular test substance or environmental contaminant and morphologic effects in fish tissues. However, the application of index systems in that context is problematic for various reasons: a dependency on untested assumptions of toxicological importance for different types of histopathologic findings; organ scores that combine mechanistically unrelated and potentially contradictory diagnoses; calculations that include excessive numbers of findings, some of which may be incidental to the study outcome; failure to incorporate additional relevant results into the data interpretation, such as clinical observations, macroscopic findings, organ/body weights, clinical pathology data, and the results of hormonal or other biochemical assays; the inappropriat...Continue Reading

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