Further variation of the adulticide protocol for the treatment of canine heartworm infection: can it be even shorter and cost less?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: This retrospective study evaluated modified three-dose melarsomine treatment protocols in a shelter setting and compared them to the American Heartworm Society (AHS)-recommended protocol. METHODS: As compared with the AHS protocol, the shelter protocols utilized doxycycline 10 mg/kg once daily (SID) or twice daily (BID), and varied the time from initiation of doxycycline (day 1) to the first melarsomine injection (M1). Dogs were retrospectively grouped based on the shelter's current protocol (M1 on day 14; Group A) and the AHS protocol (M1 on day 60; Group C), allowing a week on either side of the target M1 day. Treatments that fell outside these ranges formed two additional treatment groups (Groups B and D). Respiratory complications were defined as respiratory signs requiring additional treatment, and were statistically compared for Groups A and C. New respiratory signs and gastrointestinal (GI) signs were compared between dogs receiving SID or BID doxycycline. RESULTS: One hundred fifty-seven dogs with asymptomatic or mild heartworm disease at presentation were included. All dogs survived to discharge. There was no statistically significant difference between Groups A (n = 79) and C (n = 27) for new respiratory signs post-melarsomine (P = 0.73). The time to M1 for 14 dogs that developed new respiratory signs was a median of 19 days, compared with 22 days for 143 dogs without new respiratory signs (P = 0.2). Respiratory complications post-melarsomine were uncommon. New respiratory signs post-melarsomine occurred in 10/109 (9.2%) dogs receiving SID doxycycline and 4/48 (8.3%) dogs receiving BID doxycycline (P > 0.999). GI signs prior to M1 were recorded for 40/109 (36.7%) dogs receiving SID doxycycline and 25/48 (52.1%) receiving BID doxycycline (P = 0.08). Forty-four follow-up antigen test results were available; all tests performed > 3 months after the third melarsomine injection were negative. CONCLUSIONS: This study provided support for initiating melarsomine after 14 days of doxycycline and for a lower doxycycline dose. Shorter and less expensive treatment protocols can increase lifesaving capacity and improve quality of life for shelter dogs by reducing the duration of exercise restriction and length of stay.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".