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If your dog has had any illnesses or ailments, you can tell us about them at any time without having to complete the rest of the questionnaire. Simply login to your dog's profile by visiting www.dogslife.ac.uk and click on the link underneath your dog's graph.
Nut allergy? Dogs can help!
Lungworm
How often are you ill?
Movement Monitors
Nut allergy? Dogs can help!
If you have been receiving the Dogslife newsletter for some time, you may remember our article about Medical Detection Dogs in our September 2011 edition. Medical Detection Dogs is a charity that trains dogs to save the lives of people living with a life threatening illness. For example, dogs have so far been trained to detect cancer and sense low blood sugar in diabetics. Medical Detection Dogs has recently been in the news because the charity has now trained its first dog to help a severe nut allergy sufferer.
Nut allergies can be life threatening to sufferers, and those affected can react to nut allergens just by breathing them in. The big risk to affected individuals is coming into contact with products which contain nuts, in particular where they are not obviously “nut” based. Interestingly, dogs can also develop allergies to nuts, but they are uncommon and rarely as severe as those seen in people. Medical Detection Dogs has trained a dog to detect nut odour traces in the environment and in food, so that the sufferer can be alerted to the danger and take the appropriate steps.
Thanks to their very sensitive noses, dogs can identify odours when they are at a very low concentration in the air, so they can identify smells well before they are detectable by a human nose. It has been estimated that a dog’s sense of smell is approximately a hundred thousand to a million times more sensitive than ours. Nuts and traces of nuts can be present in a variety of places (e.g. in public spaces or work environments such as on colleagues’ desks), and in many different products, which can be difficult to notice. In training dogs to use their heightened sense of smell to detect the presence of nuts and give an alert if they smell them, the allergy sufferer is provided with reassurance (and also more independence) by having the dog with them to help check whether there are any nuts or traces of nuts in their local environment.
For more information on this story please click here.
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Lungworm
Lungworm, Angiostrongylus vasorum (sometimes referred to as heartworm), is a parasite carried by slugs and snails, which can infect dogs if they ingest them. Slug and snail activity peaks in spring and autumn months as they thrive in damp, warm conditions, at which point dogs may eat them when they find them or ingest them when they are picked up on objects they carry in their mouth.
Any type or age of dog can be affected, but younger dogs appear to be more prone to becoming infected (perhaps because puppies often try to chew or eat anything!). Although an infected dog cannot directly infect another dog, they can spread the lungworm parasite into the environment through their faeces which contains the larvae of the lungworm. Foxes can also be infected with lungworm, but there is no risk to humans.
The adult lungworm lives in the heart, and also in the blood vessels that supply the lungs, so dogs can become seriously unwell as they cause problems with the circulatory system, and a lungworm infection can sometimes prove fatal if it is not treated.
The signs of a lungworm infection are varied and can include general sickness (such as vomiting, diarrhoea, weight loss, and poor appetite), poor blood clotting (such as excessive bleeding from cuts, bleeding into the eye, nose bleeds, paleness around the gums and eyes), breathing problems (for example, tiring easily and coughing), or changes in behaviour (such as depression, seizures/fits, and becoming tired more quickly). If your dog is displaying any of these signs, or if you think your dog is at risk of picking up a lungworm infection, be sure to make an appointment to see your vet.
Lungworm can be treated and prevented by using particular wormers which kill the parasite and/or their larvae, although not all wormers have this capacity. If a dog is diagnosed with lungworm and treated, they are likely to make a full recovery, particularly if it’s treated early.
For more information on lungworm please visit http://www.lungworm.co.uk/
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How often are you ill?
Almost all of the knowledge we have about the patterns, causes and effects of health and illness in human and animal populations comes from information recorded by the health care providers, such as doctors or veterinary surgeons in hospitals. However this provides a rather incomplete picture of the overall health of a population because many of the illnesses we, or our pets, develop do not result in us going to a vet or doctor. One the goals of the Dogslife project is to try and identify what the most common illnesses are which affect dogs, including those which don’t result in owners going to a vet, so that we have a better idea of what illnesses are important to dogs and their owners.
As a simple example, do you rush straight to the vet if your dog has a gastrointestinal upset (vomiting and/or diarrhoea)? There are many factors which might affect that decision, such as how frequent the episodes are, how severe it seems, how unwell your dog appears to be, how long the gastrointestinal upset has been going on for, whether there are other signs of illness, and whether there was an explainable cause for the upset (such as your dog ingesting something they shouldn’t). There has been a limited amount of research in this area (either in people or pets) and it raises as many questions as it answers.
In one study the investigators looked at the frequency of vomiting and diarrhoea in a group of pet dogs by sending their owners a paper questionnaire which asked them if their dog had developed vomiting and/or diarrhoea in the two weeks preceding. They found very high rates of vomiting and diarrhoea (19% and 15% respectively) in this group of dogs in the two week period, although a similar questionnaire-based study (again asking owners to report the frequency of vomiting or diarrhoea in a two week period) found much lower rates of vomiting (1.8%) and diarrhoea (2.2%). There was no clear explanation for the difference between the two studies. The first study also reported that 10% of dogs which were reported to have had diarrhoea and 5% of dogs which were reported to have vomited were presented to a veterinary surgeon with their problem. They also reported that there was no association between eating titbits and developing vomiting and diarrhoea, but there was an association between the dogs scavenging in the two week period and the dog developing vomiting and diarrhoea. Similar studies of people have shown that on average, adults develop approximately one gastrointestinal upset a year, but relatively few of these episodes result in us going to the doctor. That is not to say that they are not important, as they still interfere with our normal lives.
So what are the messages we can take home? You probably already know them! Illnesses are common, both in people and dogs, and scavenging may contribute to your dog’s risk of developing vomiting and diarrhoea. Only with more detailed longitudinal studies, such as Dogslife, can we obtain more accurate measures of the incidents of these diseases (the number of episodes which occur in the population over a period of time) and subsequently look for other risks, such as activity, time of year, preventative healthcare and even genetics.
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Movement Monitors
Since June, Dogslife members have been helping us measure how much movement their dogs do by attaching small devices called accelerometers to their dogs’ collars (for more information see http://www.dogslife.ac.uk/newsletter/view/36#pup) to enable us to objectively measure exactly how much movement their dogs do each day. Thanks to their work we’ve now had the opportunity to look at the activities of the first ten dogs who wore the monitors.
The accelerometers measure exactly how much movement occurs every minute, and this is recorded as a number or “count”, which increases proportional to the frequency and size of the movement. We already know the threshold movement values in dogs (measured as “counts per minute”) which differentiate sedentary behaviour (such as sleeping), mild movements (such as walking) and moderate to high movement (such as running or playing). In the graph below we have presented the movement “measured” by the accelerometer (represented as the number of minutes each day).
We have not accounted for other variables which could affect the movement measured by the monitor, such as how long they spent in the car. Overall, the results are very similar to those reported in other studies of dog activities. And it might surprise you (or not) to note that the dogs spent the majority of each day (and night) doing relatively little activity at all.
We hope to use the monitors to differentiate the dogs which are highly active and those which are couch potatoes! At present we do not have enough information to say how accurately we can separate these dogs, but the data collected so far looks very promising. Eventually we will evaluate the information provided about each dog in the project to see whether particular types of movement are risk factors for developing certain diseases or problems in later life.
Thanks once again to everybody who has helped or offered to help with the activity monitor study so far. And well done to everybody for recording their dogs’ activity so accurately!
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