Oral Pathology in Portuguese Dogs: An Eight-Year Biopsy-Based Retrospective Study

Patient weight has diverse effects on the prescribing of different antibiotics to dogs

Introduction

Various factors including body weight-associated treatment cost may influence the probability of dispensing antibiotics to dogs in first-opinion practice, but their effect on specific drug choice remains unclear.

Methods

Multiple membership regression modeling was used to investigate the probability of dispensing 12 different antibiotics to dogs of different weights in the context of various disease presentations, using anonymized data obtained from electronic health records of 18 clinics between 2020 and 2022. Data from 14,259 dogs were analyzed.

Results

Treatment choice varied significantly with animal weight. Higher body weight was associated with an increased likelihood of dispensing lower cost antimicrobials such as amoxicillin and trimethoprim sulfonamide, while use of higher cost antimicrobials such as cefovecin was strongly biased to smaller animals. However, these effects were limited when restricted treatment options were available for the target condition.

Conclusion

This work demonstrates that anticipated financial costs may result in different treatment choices for canine patients depending on their body weight. Further work is needed to understand the impact of financial pressures on veterinarians' treatment choices, and the implications for the optimization of antimicrobial stewardship in first opinion practice.

p-S6 as a Prognostic Biomarker in Canine Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Scarce information exists on the role of mTOR pathway proteins and their association to aggressiveness and prognosis of patients with canine oral cancers. We aimed to investigate the activated form of mTOR and its downstream S6 protein in canine oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC), and to evaluate potential associations between protein expression and clinic-pathologic variables and survival. For that we analysed p-mTOR and p-S6 protein expression by immunohistochemistry in 61 canine OSCCs. Multivariate analysis was conducted to examine their role in patients’ cancer-specific survival (CSS). p-mTOR and p-S6 expression were present in almost all cases. High-expression of p-mTOR was observed in 44 (72.1%) cases using extent score and 52 (85.2%) cases using intensity score. For p-S6, high expression was observed in 53 (86.9%) cases using extent score and in 54 (88.5%) cases using intensity score. An independent prognostic value for p-S6 extension (p = 0.027), tumour stage (p = 0.013) and treatment (p = 0.0009) was found in patients’ CSS analysis. Our data suggest that p-mTOR and p-S6 proteins are commonly expressed in canine OSCC and p-S6 expression is correlated with poor CSS in dogs with OSCC. More studies should be performed to identify possible therapeutic targets related with mTOR pathway for these patients.