K-BAD: Estimating the Kanine Burden of Animal Disease in the UK (In Progress)
People: David Brodbelt, Dan O'Neill
People: Georgie Barry, David Brodbelt, Dan O’Neill, Kendy Teng
Dates: October 2024 - October 2027
Background
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Estimating the overall disease burden within breed and for dogs in general is important to identify the most impactful disorders, explore changes in health over time, and simulate the consequences of major changes in breed distributions on dog health. Much work has been done on human disease burdens and, more recently, in production animals, but little work has been undertaken in dogs. Collecting data on diagnoses from over 30% of UK veterinary practices, VetCompass has reported on the frequency of disorders seen in common breeds and dogs overall and has reported on the duration and severity for common disorders. However, the next important step is to focus on the disease burden within key breeds, to understand the impact of common disorders on their quality and duration of life and expand this work to predict the broader effects of changes in ownership of these key breeds over time.
This project will build on earlier VetCompass work and focus on the disease burden in key common breeds within VetCompass. The frequency, severity, time spent with illness and years lost through early death for the top conditions will be recorded from the electronic health records of these dog breeds. Using measures developed previously and adapting machine learning work from human health, measures of years lost due to these diseases will be developed as well as estimates of time spent with illness, to establish summary measures of adverse health impacts due to common diseases that are comparable across common breeds.
Evaluating projected changes in breed ownership can allow us to anticipate the impact of increases in the popularity of high-burden breeds as well as simulate the effects of reducing the breeding of identified ‘problem’ breeds. To provide a framework to assess population-level changes, statistical models will be developed to simulate the impact of changing ownership patterns in the key breeds on the overall burden of disease for dogs in the UK. This novel approach will allow estimation across a range of scenarios of the likely effect on dog health and the provision of veterinary care, of changing ownership of high disease burden breeds.
External Supervisors
Assistant Professor Kendy Teng (National Chung Hsing University)
Funding
This project is funded by .
Vet Compass Project Type: Dog