Retrospective Case Control Study of Pet Ferrets with Cystine Urolithiasis in Quebec, Canada: Epidemiological and Clinical Features
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: To describe epidemiological and clinical features of cystine urolithiasis \nin pet ferrets. \nMethods: Retrospective case control study on medical records from four private \nclinics and one teaching hospital for pet ferrets diagnosed with cystine urolithiasis \nconfirmed by spectrophotometry presented between July 2014 and July 2019 in \nQuebec, Canada; these cases were then compared to a reference population of \n210 ferrets (controls) presented at the same facilities over the same timeframe. \nResults: Among the 36 identified cases, most affected ferrets were neutered males \n(32/36, 89%) and the mean age at presentation was 1.8 (± 1.0 standard deviation) \nyear. Grain-free diets of six different brands were offered for at least three weeks \nprior to the presentation to 34/36 (94%) of the included cases. The ferrets that \ndeveloped cystine urolithiasis were 57.9 times (Odds ratio [OR], 95% Confidence \ninterval [95% CI]: 11.0, 304.8) more likely to receive a grain-free diet compared to \nthe reference population. No significant difference in the values for the energy, \nprotein, cysteine, and methionine contents were detected between the grainfree and the cereal-based diets offered to these pet ferrets. Among ferrets with \nuroliths, those with urethral calculi were 4.7 times (OR, 95% CI: 2.1, 10.4) more \nlikely to develop an acute urinary tract obstruction. \nConclusion: Although a definitive causation could not be drawn solely from these \nclinical cases, this case control study highlights a possible nutritional aetiology in \nthe complex pathogenesis of cystine urolithiasis in ferrets.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".