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Read the first scientific results from Dogslife!
Getting to the root of tooth health
A tale of dogs, oats and bendy bones!
Are you having difficulties completing your dog’s monthly results?
Read the first scientific results from Dogslife!
We are delighted to announce that the first detailed report from the Dogslife project has been published in the scientific journal BMC Veterinary Research. The publication details how we set up the study and recruited participants, and some of the information you kindly provided us with in the first year of the project.
Given that Dogslife is the first internet-based longitudinal study of pet health, a number of important conclusions were drawn from the data collected in the project. As you might expect, owners were most likely to participate in the project when we had permission from the Kennel Club to contact them directly by e-mail and/or post. The majority of dogs registered with the study were living in households containing a family or an adult couple. When asked their reason for participating in the study, the majority of owners reported that they were doing so for altruistic reasons (to help with the research). Over 90% of members elected to receive the monthly Dogslife newsletter, and nearly 50% of members used the on-line scrapbook to store photos of their dogs.
Comparisons of the gender and coat colour of dogs enrolled in the project, and their recorded address (postcode) with that of all the dogs registered with the Kennel Club over the same period showed that recruited dogs are broadly the same as (and therefore representative of) the general Labrador Retriever population. This is important as we hope that any conclusions we draw from the project will be applied to the whole Labrador population in the future.
We estimated that approximately 80% of dogs participating in the project developed an illness in their first year of life, and that just over half of dogs were presented to their vet for an illness in the same time period. We are currently in the process of analysing the veterinary records of part of the cohort, which will allow us to report much more accurately the frequency of different diseases recorded by the project.
You can read the full manuscript here if you wish. In line with the aims and ethos underpinning the study, we have paid to publish the results in an “open access” scientific journal which means that anybody can read our report if they wish without having to pay a fee or subscription. This is important, as it means we can disseminate the results of our project quickly and to everybody who wants to see them.
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Getting to the root of tooth health
Thanks to the dedication of Dogslife owners, we have received over 200 photographs of the mouths of dogs participating in the project when they reached their first birthday. We were keen to collect the photographs for two reasons: firstly to follow the oral health of dogs involved in the project and to look how it varies with diet, and secondly to test how much useful information can be collected through photographs uploaded to the website. Telemedicine (the use of telecommunication and information technologies to provide healthcare information remotely from the patient) is an emerging branch of medical care, and the assessment of digital images of patients is already being used in people to help assess and support their dental health.
Last summer, a third year student at the University of Edinburgh, Eleanor Jones, evaluated the oral health of all the photographs we had received for their quality, the number of teeth visible on each photo and the presence of any abnormalities. She found that most photographs provided useful information, and that on average she could see seven teeth on each image.
As you would expect for such a young group of dogs, they almost always had perfect oral health! Less that 7% had any calculus (also known as tartar, which is the hard form of dental plaque which dentists remove with an ultrasonic scaler). Even in those cases where calculus was seen, it was very minimal. The even better news was that ginigivitis (inflammation of the gums) was only seen definitely in one dog. There was no evidence that feeding titbits, or dry food alone compared to dry and wet food, influenced the risks of developing calculus. Again, this was not a surprise as the number of dogs developing calculus was extremely small (because they are so young), and there was a wide variety of different types of food which were fed. Consequently, we cannot draw firm conclusions about how feeding affects the health of teeth from our study at present.
Because dental health is so important we are collecting photographs of dogs’ teeth again when they reach 3 years of age so that we can see how their dental health progresses with time. When your dog reaches this age you will receive an e-mail with instructions indicating how you can upload the photographs.
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A tale of dogs, oats and bendy bones!
Did you know that dogs were pivotal to the discovery that a lack of Vitamin D in the diet causes rickets? Rickets is a disease resulting in the softening of the bone most commonly caused by a lack of Vitamin D. Vitamin D has many functions for maintaining health, the most important of which is the maintenance of calcium levels in the body and keeping the skeleton healthy.
The link between rickets and Vitamin D was made by Sir Edward Mellanby in the early part of the 20th century by feeding a group of dogs a diet consisting exclusively of oats (which had an extremely low Vitamin D content). The dogs developed signs of rickets (poor mineralisation of the bone, and deformities of the skeleton) when fed the diet. Mellanby then cured the dogs of rickets by giving them cod-liver oil (which contains high levels of Vitamin D) in their diet, which allowed him to deduce that there was “something” in the cod-liver oil which was not present in the oats that was essential in preventing rickets. Later in the 20th century scientists identified that this mysterious “something” was Vitamin D.
Of course we now know that it is important to prevent rickets by eating sufficient Vitamin D, or exposing ourselves to sunlight which allows it to be produced in the skin. In Mellanby’s experiment the dogs were not exposed to sunlight, although this didn’t matter as dogs and cats can’t produce Vitamin D in their skin and thus rely entirely on their diet for their Vitamin D intake. However, we very rarely see true cases of rickets in dogs or cats as commercial diets and other meat-based diets provide an ample dietary source of Vitamin D.
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Are you having difficulties completing your dog’s monthly results?
The data members provide on their dogs’ health and lifestyle is invaluable to our research so we would really like to know if any difficulties are encountered when using the site.
To complete your dog’s record, simply login to Dogslife and click on the red button entitled, ‘Enter your dog’s monthly results’ situated to the left of your dog’s profile page, or click on the link under your dog’s graph (circled in red in the image below).
Here you can begin the online questionnaire about your dog’s recent health. It always helps to have all of your dog’s information to hand (e.g. height, weight, feeding, dates of vet visits and treatments) so that you are not ‘timed out’ of the session. If you experience any problems when entering your dog’s details (e.g. the screen freezes, or an error message comes up) please contact us at info@dogslife.ac.uk with the answers to the questions on that page so that we can enter your dog’s information for you.
If you wish to resume data entry after an error has occurred, simply logout of your dog’s profile, then log back in again and click on the link under your dog’s graph (circled in red in the image below) to pick up the questionnaire from where you left off.
Thanks to all our members for their help and support with the project. Dogslife aims to provide a website that is quick and user friendly so that with your help, we can continue to collect important information to help us find out what keeps dogs healthy!
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Don't forget to come back to Dogslife to update your dog's record www.dogslife.ac.uk
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