Serum cardiac biomarker analysis in dogs with naturally occurring dilated cardiomyopathy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Identifying dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) in dogs before the onset of congestive heart failure remains one of the most pressing challenges in veterinary cardiology. Physical examination and thoracic radiography lack the sensitivity to detect early myocardial dysfunction, and echocardiography while considered the gold standard requires specialist equipment and expertise not available in most general practices. Circulating cardiac biomarkers offer a blood-based screening alternative, but their diagnostic and prognostic value across the spectrum of DCM severity in naturally affected dogs has not been fully defined.This research measured serum concentrations of cardiac troponin I (cTnI), N-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP), and creatine kinase myocardial band (CK-MB) in 60 dogs: 38 with echocardiographically confirmed DCM classified by the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (ACVIM) staging system (Stage B1, n = 11; Stage B2, n = 14; Stage C, n = 13) and 22 breed-matched healthy controls. Dogs were recruited prospectively at the Toronto Metropolitan University of Veterinary Medicine Cardiology Service between March 2021 and September 2023. Blood was collected at the time of echocardiographic assessment, and biomarker concentrations were measured using validated immunoassay platforms.All three biomarkers were significantly elevated in DCM dogs compared with controls (P<0.001 for each). Median cTnI was 0.62 ng/mL (interquartile range [IQR] 0.21–1.47) in the DCM group versus 0.04 ng/mL (IQR 0.02–0.07) in controls. Median NT-proBNP was 1,847 pmol/L (IQR 786–4,218) in DCM dogs versus 312 pmol/L (IQR 198–441) in controls. CK-MB was mildly elevated in DCM dogs (mean 14.7 ± 6.3 U/L vs 7.2 ± 2.1 U/L; P<0.01) but showed lower discriminatory power than the other two markers. A stepwise increase in both cTnI and NT-proBNP was observed across ACVIM stages, with the steepest rise occurring between Stage B2 and Stage C. Serum cTnI correlated positively with left ventricular internal diameter in diastole (LVIDd; r = 0.73; P<0.001) and negatively with fractional shortening (r = ?0.68; P<0.001). ROC analysis showed that cTnI at a cut-off of 0.10 ng/mL had a sensitivity of 92.1% and specificity of 90.9% for distinguishing DCM dogs from controls (AUC = 0.95), while NT-proBNP at 550 pmol/L achieved sensitivity of 86.8% and specificity of 86.4% (AUC = 0.91).These findings support the use of cTnI as a first-line screening biomarker for occult and overt DCM in predisposed breeds, with NT-proBNP providing complementary information on the degree of myocardial wall stress. A combined biomarker panel may offer the most robust approach to early detection and severity stratification in clinical practice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".