Association between life span and body condition in neutered client-owned dogs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: There is an association between overweight status and life span in kenneled dogs, but a similar association has not been reported for pet dogs. OBJECTIVES: To examine the effects of being overweight in middle age on the life span of neutered client-owned dogs. ANIMALS: Fifty-thousand seven-hundred eighty seven middle-aged neutered client-owned dogs attending a network of approximately 900 veterinary hospitals across North America. METHODS: Retrospective case-control study. For each of 12 breeds, groups of dogs aged between 6.5 and 8.5 years were identified as being in "overweight" or "normal" body condition. Within each breed and sex, differences in life span between dogs in normal body condition and overweight body condition in the 2 groups were then analyzed by Cox proportional hazards models. RESULTS: For all breeds, instantaneous risk of death for dogs in overweight body condition was greater than those in normal body condition throughout the age range studied, with hazard ratios ranging from 1.35 (99.79% confidence interval [CI] 1.05-1.73) for German Shepherd dog to 2.86 (99.79% CI 2.14-3.83) for Yorkshire Terrier. In all breeds, median life span was shorter in overweight compared with normal weight dogs, with the difference being greatest in Yorkshire Terriers (overweight: 13.7 years, 99.79% CI 13.3-14.2; normal: 16.2 years, 99.79% CI 15.7-16.5) and least in German Shepherd dogs (overweight: 12.1 years, 99.79% CI 11.8-12.4; normal: 12.5 years, 99.79% CI 12.2-12.9). CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL IMPORTANCE: Veterinary professionals should consider promoting healthy body condition for dogs, particularly from midlife onward.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".