Dexmedetomidine oromucosal gel reduces fear and anxiety in dogs during veterinary visits: A randomised, double‐blind, placebo‐controlled clinical pilot study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Introduction Many dogs are anxious and/or fearful in veterinary clinics and exhibit avoidant and/or defensive behaviour. The purpose of pharmacological interventions is to reduce anxiety and to enable patient‐friendly, low stress physical examination and procedures. Materials and methods This was a randomised, double‐blind, placebo‐controlled, parallel‐group, multicentre, clinical‐field study. The eligible dogs ( n = 76) were randomly assigned to receive dexmedetomidine 0.1 mg/g oromucosal gel at a dose of 125 μg/m 2 ( n = 27) or 250 μg/m 2 ( n = 24), or an equivalent volume of placebo gel ( n = 23). Results The investigator's ability to perform the intended procedure (physical examination and 1 short minor veterinary or husbandry procedure) was excellent for 40.7% of the dogs that received dexmedetomidine 125 μg/m 2 and 33.3% of those that received dexmedetomidine 250 μg/m 2 compared to only 4.3% of the placebo dogs. The overall treatment effect was statistically significant ( p = 0.03). In addition, the investigators subjective stress level assessments revealed that dexmedetomidine treated dogs showed significantly more commonly relaxed body posture ( p < 0.01) and more relaxed behaviour when entering the examination room ( p = 0.02). There were very few adverse events, and treated animals were not sedated. Conclusions This study indicated a beneficial treatment effect of dexmedetomidine gel in alleviation of canine fear and anxiety during minor veterinary or husbandry procedures in the clinic environment in dogs previously reported to suffer from fear and anxiety during veterinary visits. Both dexmedetomidine gel doses studied were effective, and no clinical safety concerns were noticed for either dose.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".