Leptospirosis is a widespread disease throughout the world, presenting in severe clinical forms in dogs. The pathogenicity of the different serovars in field infections is not fully documented, and clinical diagnosis is often limited to a combination of serological tests and molecular analyses. The latter, although a fundamental tool, cannot identify the infecting strain without further analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVarious inflammatory and renal biomarkers have already been assessed for monitoring the response to anti-leishmanial therapy in canine leishmaniosis. This study assessed the parasite load, various inflammatory and renal biomarkers pre- and post-treatment, and any association between the studied variables and the degree of disease severity at diagnosis. This is a prospective cohort study of 30 client-owned dogs with leishmaniosis, classified according to LeishVet's guidelines as stage I (n = 2), stage IIa (n = 7), stage IIb (n = 6), stage III (n = 8), and stage IV (n = 7).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Renal disease in canine leishmaniosis is of great importance owing to increased risk of mortality. In human visceral leishmaniosis, monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1) has been used as a marker of renal damage and inflammation. The purpose of this study was first to determine the serum MCP-1 and urinary MCP-1-to-creatinine ratio (uMCP-1/Cr) in healthy dogs and dogs with leishmaniosis at diagnosis, and second to determine whether these markers can differentiate disease severity at diagnosis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMultiple hemostatic abnormalities are associated with paraneoplastic syndrome and some malignant tumors. Lymphoma is the most common hematopoietic neoplasm in dogs, sometimes associated with hemostatic changes. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the behavior of coagulation parameters in dogs with multicentric lymphoma compared with diseased dogs without lymphoma, to separately evaluate the effect of immunophenotype (B lymphoma versus T lymphoma) on the variables of interest as well as the effect of disease stage (stage II to IV versus stage V).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Chromatogr B Analyt Technol Biomed Life Sci
January 2024
Rodent control strategies are primarily based on the use of anticoagulant rodenticides (ARs), making them widely used worldwide. However, due to their high toxicity and availability, ARs are among the leading causes of animal poisoning in Europe. They are the primary agents involved in intoxication in cats and the second in dogs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMetaldehyde, a widely used molluscicide, is the third cause of intoxication by pesticides in domestic animals in Europe. Most mammalian species are susceptible, and its exposure may lead to death within a few hours. While metaldehyde intoxication diagnosis is in most cases presumptive, based on the symptomatology or from "postmortem" analysis, few analytical methods are currently available for live animals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLeptospirosis is one of the most widespread zoonotic diseases and can infect both humans and animals worldwide. The role of the cat as a susceptible host and potential environmental reservoir of is still not well understood, due to the lack of obvious clinical signs associated with spp. infection in this species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn Europe, spp. infection was documented in domestic and wild felids. Cats often develop a subclinical infection, while fatal disease is rare.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) represents a very promising approach to decreasing disease activity in canine chronic enteropathies (CE). However, the relationship between remission mechanisms and microbiome changes has not been elucidated yet. The main objective of this study was to report the clinical effects of oral freeze-dried FMT in CE dogs, comparing the fecal microbiomes of three groups: pre-FMT CE-affected dogs, post-FMT dogs, and healthy dogs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe emotional stress experienced by pet caregivers, induced by negative diagnoses, clinical problems, and/or long-term therapies should be taken into serious consideration by the veterinarians to prevent these individuals from the risk of experiencing incapability of dealing with the great burden and the eventual reduction of compliance. Understanding the client's affective state may enhance the veterinarian's empathic response and effective communication. To understand better the unmet needs of clients, we collected data on service requests at the clinic and emotions that caregivers felt in the veterinarian setting.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA significant proportion of canine urothelial carcinomas carry the driver valine to glutamic acid variation (V595E) in BRAF kinase. The detection of V595E may prove suitable to guide molecularly targeted therapies and support non-invasive diagnosis of the urogenital system by means of a liquid biopsy approach using urine. Three cohorts and a control group were included in this multi-step validation study which included setting up a digital PCR assay.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFParasit Vectors
March 2022
Background: In canine leishmaniosis (CanL) endemic areas, pathologists often receive skin biopsies for testing with histopathologic findings suggestive-but not conclusive for a definitive diagnosis-of CanL lesions. I the absence of data on the infective status of animals, the diagnosis can therefore be challenging. The aim of this retrospective study was to evaluate the ability of immunohistochemistry (IHC) and quantitative PCR (qPCR) methods to detect Leishmania infection in skin biopsies with a histopathologic diagnosis of lymphoplasmacytic/histiocytic and/or granulomatous dermatitis and to correlate the pattern, depth and severity of the histopathologic lesions with the parasite load detected by qPCR and IHC.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPneumocystis is an atypical fungus that resides in the pulmonary parenchyma of many mammals, including humans and dogs. Immunocompetent human hosts are usually asymptomatically colonised or show subtle clinical signs, but some immunocompromised people can develop florid life-threatening Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP). Since much less is known concerning Pneumocystis in dogs, we posit the question: can Pneumocystis colonization be present in dogs with inflammatory airway or lung disease caused by other pathogens or disease processes? In this study, Pneumocystis DNA was detected in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) of 22/255 dogs (9%) with respiratory distress and/or chronic cough.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
February 2022
Leptospirosis is a worldwide zoonosis frequently responsible for clinical disease in dogs and rarely reported in human people. The risk of human exposure to Leptospira has been investigated in a sample population working in the northeast of Italy, a geographical area with high endemicity of canine leptospirosis. Two-hundred twenty-one human serum samples were analyzed for Leptospira microagglutination test (MAT): 112 clinical freelance small animal practitioners (exposed subjects) and 109 people not occupationally exposed to Leptospira-infected animals (unexposed subjects) were voluntarily enrolled.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe aim was to assess the effects of (AN) with/without C-3102 as alternative treatments for Chronic Inflammatory Enteropathy (CIE) of dogs. Fourteen CIE patients, which had received the same control (CTR) diet, were enrolled to serially receive three diets: (1) hydrolysed protein (HP) diet; (2) 4.0% AN supplemented HP (HPA) food, (3) HPA diet fortified with 125 billion C-3102 spores/10 kg body weight (HPAB diet).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFor brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), obtaining sufficient training data for algorithms that map neural signals onto actions can be difficult, expensive or even impossible. Here we report the development and use of a generative model-a model that synthesizes a virtually unlimited number of new data distributions from a learned data distribution-that learns mappings between hand kinematics and the associated neural spike trains. The generative spike-train synthesizer is trained on data from one recording session with a monkey performing a reaching task and can be rapidly adapted to new sessions or monkeys by using limited additional neural data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBabesia gibsoni (B. gibsoni) infection was sporadically described in Europe. In Italy, in particular, it was detected by PCR analysis only in one dog with unclear source of infection, while it has never been found in molecular studies involving more subjects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Cilia-associated respiratory bacillus (CARB; now known as Filobacterium rodentium gen. nov., sp.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Canine vector-borne diseases (CVBDs) associated to ticks are among the most important health issues affecting dogs. In Italy, Ehrlichia canis, Anaplasma spp., Rickettsia conorii and Borrelia burgdorferi (s.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Leukoreduction is a routine procedure in human transfusion medicine but is uncommon in veterinary.
Objectives: To evaluate the effect of leukoreduction on the quality of canine whole blood (WB) and blood products during storage.
Animals: Ten canine blood donors.
Protothecosis is an uncommon disease caused by algae of the genus . In dogs, the infection is usually first localized to the colon but has the propensity to later disseminate hematogenously to many other organs, with marked tropism for the eyes and central nervous system. Diagnosis is established by culture and/or evidence of organisms in cytologic or histologic preparations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFErythema multiforme (EM), an uncommon immune-mediated skin disorder of cats, conceivably could be triggered by feline herpesvirus type-1 (FHV-1) infection, in a manner analogous to human herpesvirus-associated EM (HAEM). This report describes a 10-year-old Persian-mixed cat with a presumptive diagnosis of HAEM.
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