New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

David Bailey — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 10:18:55 GMT

Yes. The term is called non accidental injury or NAI's. there seems to be a lot of current cases involving the use of this term- some but not all are breed/ inbreed related.

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

Bob Russell — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 10:06:28 GMT

So we may start facing welfare situations that look like abuse but in reality are breeder related?

I know one case in a child where the parents were vilified by medical professionals and welfare services alike until someone worked out the child had a medical problem and the parents were blameness. I do hope we don't get into that situation!

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

David Mills — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 00:08:19 GMT

see https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1000579

5 dachsies?

[quote userid="25917" url="~/001/veterinary-clinical/small-animal/f/misc-clinical-discussions/30585/new-research-miniature-dachshund-risk-of-death-doubles-by-having-an-overweight-or-obese-body-condition/240926#240926"]I’m doing some research into this into a current criminal legal case. [/quote]

Hmmm

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

David Bailey — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 21:50:02 GMT

I’m doing some research into this into a current criminal legal case.
About 1 in 8 of these dogs will have a version of osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) or brittle bone disease. There are variations that are fatal at birth and don’t survive the passage through birth canal while there are also less serious versions of the disease that may reveal themselves as incidental findings in older dogs who survive long enough to breed and be a pet but die young.

see https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1000579

As a starting point.

some regions of Germany the incidence is 1 in 5.

thought this might help.

best wishes.

david.

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

Sean McCormack — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 15:08:43 GMT

Thanks Bob!

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

Bob Russell — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 13:24:06 GMT

Thank you for making an effort with the numbers available to you!

It is fairly obvious that there is a struggle with obtaining any information because animal numbers are going to be small and the information subject to the vagaries of owners.

We should all be used to research in the veterinary field having degrees of unreliability built in. How many of us avoided opiates in cats on the basis of one paper?

I don't consider this paper to be garbage but it is open to challenge. Nothing wrong with that!

It is healthy for us to be a profession of skeptics but unhealthy to dismiss work out of hand because it is not produced under perfect conditions. It is doing the best we can!

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

Sean McCormack — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 12:04:32 GMT

Hi Chris,

Valid points. We can only use the data we have and we’re being open and honest about the limitations. You are correct that there are significant data quality issues with asking owners to accurately asses their dog’s body condition score. This is why in the paper we are very explicit about our approach to handling this and discuss the subject at length. We may explore this in further detail in a future study.
Our dataset is quite extensive, and we do give some instruction to our dog owners in assessing a body condition, which we hope help our data in this space to be better than average.
We then simply seek to present our findings on the data we have, report on and discuss the associations we see. Our findings are in line with other longevity studies in this area so we do believe that despite the data quality issues we highlighted, we can still draw useful and interesting conclusions. And any contribution we can make into this important area of dog health and wellbeing is valuable we feel.

On your point about variation in size within breeds, agree we will see a range of healthy weights in the breed, and in our own data we have a range for an expected weight. Again, that’s why we take weight AND BCS and to try and conclude which dogs are overweight or healthy weight, but it’s not an exact science. We're studying relationships using a large database so can still identify patterns accounting for owner subjectivity. I think it's unfair to call it garbage.

On the Dachsie Q though - if we think larger frame Mini Dachsies are more at risk of health issues - then perhaps we need a clinical study to assess properly. Still a good place to end up from our analysis I think.

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

Arlo Guthrie — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 10:54:33 GMT

Glad you did! Thank you.

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

Sean McCormack — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 10:51:59 GMT

Oh I was tempted, but resisted. Unsurprised. Shall say no more.

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

Arlo Guthrie — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 10:45:44 GMT

[quote userid="14489" url="~/001/veterinary-clinical/small-animal/f/misc-clinical-discussions/30585/new-research-miniature-dachshund-risk-of-death-doubles-by-having-an-overweight-or-obese-body-condition/240857#240857"]several of your observations....let's say need some more thought.[/quote]

Sean McCormack I needed cheering up this morning, and that did the job, thank you. Not because I have any opinion on whether you're right or wrong, BTW. It was just a funny retort.

Actually, the rest of your reply was very measured too. Others might have been tempted to reply less politely, methinks.

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

Sean McCormack — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 10:32:36 GMT

Hi Francisco, yes I still do occasionally.

https://shows.acast.com/seanswildlife

Happy to chat ideas!

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

Sean McCormack — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 10:16:51 GMT

Hi Michael,

I wonder if you just skimmed the report rather than read it in detail as several of your questions are answered within it, and several of your observations....let's say need some more thought. Anyway, we do have a "proper data nerd" here at tails.com, her name is Dr Lorna Brightmore and she has a PhD in Data Science.

First off thanks for your interest in the work and your observations. More detailed breakdowns of the number of obese and ideal weight dogs of each breed weren’t originally included in the paper. This was simply for brevity, but we will include this detail in a revised version as it seems to be of interest, rather than responding directly here. I will address your other comments below.

There seems to be some confusion around the number of dogs we included in the study, and our exclusion criteria. So to clarify on this, we identified around 342,000 potential dogs from our database to include in the study, that came from our 20 most populous breeds. Part of these data preparation steps included excluding dogs where the reported weight was over our expected range for the breed. These come from our internal expectations for the breed, and are stratified by sex.

After our data preparation steps outlined in the paper, in the Methodology section, we then reduced this to approximately 200,000 dogs for the regression analysis. These are the numbers in the table on page 5. As you correctly point out, 3,077 of these are Miniature Dachshunds. Whilst this is a small proportion of the overall dogs in the study, it is still a meaningfully large sample of dogs to study to draw statistically significant results from, and somewhat larger than many other longevity studies.

To clarify some points in our methodology, neutered and entire dogs from each breed were included in the analysis. As well as body condition (our main factor of interest), we included neutering status, along with sex and age at the start of the study in the regression analysis because these are factors that have known associations to longevity. We also used a matching technique and tested for proportional hazards assumptions with these variables, so that we could separate out the association of body condition with each of these factors in the regression analysis. This is detailed in section 2.5 of the paper.

To address your comments on the results presented, all hazard ratios presented are where we could find a statistically significant result (p-value < 0.05) for the association between an overweight body condition and longevity. For miniature dachshunds, as with all breed specific hazard ratios reported, this result is statistically significant, and the hazard ratio lies within the stated interval, with 95% confidence. These 9 breeds account for around 50% of the dogs in our regression models, including our top two most populous breeds.

We found similar associations in the hazard ratios for other breeds, but elected not to publish these results because we didn’t observe these results with statistical significance.

The life expectancy results are included as an illustration to the hazard ratio results, to contextualise with something more tangible for those less informed on survival analysis. For conciseness, we only chose to show the life expectancies for neutered breeds where we could find a finite confidence interval around the value.

Finally, a power analysis would usually be done when starting a study to determine the sample size needed to observe a given effect size with enough confidence. As this was a retrospective study on our data we had available, no power analysis was relevant here.

Not completing an analysis in one model excluding breed as a factor was a very deliberate choice. The reason for this is that the proportion of overweight dogs in each breed varies quite significantly, as does the average life expectancy. So, it would be nonsensical to try and draw any meaningful conclusions with this approach. This is the same reason I imagine why other similar longevity studies also don’t take this approach, and either just study one breed, or treat each breed separately in the analysis.

We welcome input and collaboration with any vets who are interested in our data, and improving our collective understanding of dog health and longevity.

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

Chris Geddes — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 16:06:38 GMT

I have two Jack Russell Terriers, 5.6kg and 6.4kg. Are either of them overweight Sean?

Since you're talking about dachsies. A 5kg dachsie could be overweight, a 7kg dachsie could be underweight. Study after study and years of experience tells us that owners have no clue. On that note, they have no clue of the weight of their dog either most of the time.

Asking the owner is inaccurate; estimating by weight and breed is inaccurate. Garbage + garbage does not equal data?

Did you consider that larger frame dachsies are at increased risk?

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

Sean McCormack — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 10:06:34 GMT

The most likely explanation is the well researched link between obesity and intervertrebral disc disease (IVDD) in this breed, which causes paralysis without expensive surgery, so can obviously limit lifespan. But we plan on doing some follow up qualitative research on this at a later date to talk to owners of certain breeds with high risk of genetic health problems.

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

Michael Woodhouse — Sat, 18 Feb 2023 00:43:35 GMT

[quote userid="2100" url="~/001/veterinary-clinical/small-animal/f/misc-clinical-discussions/30585/new-research-miniature-dachshund-risk-of-death-doubles-by-having-an-overweight-or-obese-body-condition/240841#240841"]Any thoughts as to why that might be?[/quote]

No, because the data presented is terribly incomplete. I'd love a proper data nerd to go over the stats, but a few observations

There are very few miniature dachshunds in the study (200,000 dogs claimed at the start, only, 3077 included)

The exclusion criteria not entirely clear - seems we included neutered status to start with then ignored that later as few dogs

Of the 20 breeds studied, only hazard ratios presented for 9 and lifespan data for 12.

No lifespan data actually presented for the small number of dachshunds.

Look at the confidence intervals, the wider the range, the less certain we are with the result given. Much broader range for the dachshunds, less certain of result - more likely to be due to chance.

No numbers of how many dogs included in 'healthy' and 'overweight' categories.

What about underweight dogs? I have concerns regarding excluding dogs over breed expectation - where was this data from? Stratified by sex? Single number or a range? The pool of normal dogs shrinks further.

Owner reported data often unreliable. They acknowledge this. We used Tails for a while and I stuck in a rough DOB and a rough weight, little care taken in the accuracy as little point from my point of view.

Please can we see the full output for all 20 breeds from the model, including numbers in each group? Please, can we see all the age data for the 20 breeds?

Did we even attempt a power calculation at the start to look at the numbers of animals we would need, in each group, to see a statistical difference?

Did we consider running the model excluding breed and looking whether for all dogs "healthy" or "obese" was associated with lifespan? That would be the biggest numbers and more power, and is a glaring omission from the work.

Where exactly has this been published?

I think a better, but less catchy headline, would be "researchers found when looking at a very small subpopulation of dogs in a much larger data set, some spurious findings".....

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

Francisco Gomez — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 21:53:54 GMT

This is interesting. I hear you used to podcast. Maybe we could collaborate.

RE: New research: Miniature Dachshund risk of death doubles by having an overweight or obese body condition

Arlo Guthrie — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 09:56:54 GMT

[quote userid="14489" url="~/001/veterinary-clinical/small-animal/f/misc-clinical-discussions/30585/new-research-miniature-dachshund-risk-of-death-doubles-by-having-an-overweight-or-obese-body-condition"]The most shocking was that Miniature Dachshunds are statistically more than twice as likely to die at any point in time when overweight or obese compared with their ideal body condition score counterparts![/quote]

Any thoughts as to why that might be?