Background: Objective risk stratification models are used routinely in human critical care medicine. Applications include quantitative and objective delineation of illness severity for patients enrolled in clinical research, performance benchmarking, and protocol development for triage and therapeutic management.Objective: To develop an accurate, validated, and user-friendly model to stratify illness severity by mortality risk in hospitalized dogs.Animals: Eight hundred and ten consecutive intensive care unit (ICU) admissions of dogs at a veterinary teaching hospital. Methods: Prospective census cohort study. Data on 55 management, physiological, and biochemical variables were collected within 24 hours of admission. Data were randomly divided, with 598 patient records used for logistic regression model construction and 212 for model validation.Results: Patient mortality was 18.4%. Ten-variable and 5-variable models were developed to provide both a high-performance model and model maximizing accessibility, while maintaining good performance. The 10-variable model contained creatinine, WBC count, albumin, SpO 2 , total bilirubin, mentation score, respiratory rate, age, lactate, and presence of free fluid in a body cavity. Area under the receiver operator characteristic (AUROC) on the construction data set was 0.93, and on the validation data set was 0.91. The 5-variable model contained glucose, albumin, mentation score, platelet count, and lactate. AUROC on the construction data set was 0.87, and on the validation data set was 0.85.Conclusions and Clinical Importance: Two models are presented that enable allocation of an accurate and user-friendly illness severity index for dogs admitted to an ICU. These models operate independent of primary diagnosis, and have been independently validated.

Objective: To report clinical findings and explore prognostic factors for dogs that had cholecystectomy for gall bladder mucocele. Study Design: Retrospective case series. Animals: Dogs (n = 43) with gall bladder mucoceles. Results: Diagnosis of gall bladder mucoceles was confirmed by histopathology and 74% were diagnosed based on preoperative abdominal ultrasonography. Intraoperative evidence of gall bladder rupture was noted in 10 dogs (23%), and 16 (37%) had evidence of previous leakage in the abdominal cavity. One dog had positive bacterial growth from the gall bladder content. The most common histopathologic findings in liver biopsies obtained at surgery were cholangiohepatitis, biliary hyperplasia, or cholestasis. Univariate analysis showed evidence of postoperative hypotension (P = .05) to be significantly negatively associated with survival. Significant difference in mean postoperative serum lactate (P = .034) and postoperative packed cell volume (P = .063) between dogs that survived and died was also noted. Conclusions: Elevations in postoperative serum lactate concentrations and immediate postoperative hypotension in dogs undergoing cholecystectomy for gall bladder mucoceles are associated with poor clinical outcome.Although a recognized disease process for several decades, the incidence of gall bladder mucoceles (GM) in dogs appears to be increasing.

For dogs with oral malignant melanoma, increasing tumor size and age were negative prognostic factors. Complete excision of all macroscopic tumor burden improved survival time. Long-term survival was possible following surgery alone. Although systemic adjuvant therapy was not found to improve survival time, this could have been due to type II error.

There was no significant difference in outcomes between dogs receiving GEN1 and GEN2 for limb-sparing surgery of the radius. Metastatic frequency and survival time for metal endoprosthesis were similar to that of amputation with curative intent chemotherapy.

Variable pathways of lymphatic drainage have been described in the dog head and neck. The aim of this study was to retrospectively assess the patterns of lymph node metastasis in dogs with malignancies of the head following bilateral mandibular and medial retropharyngeal lymphadenectomy. Thirty-one dogs were included. Median age at surgery was 10 years (range: 5 months to 14 years) and mean bodyweight was 21.4 ± 11.9 kg. Lymph node metastasis occurred in 14 dogs (45%), with spread to mandibular lymph nodes in 14 dogs and medial retropharyngeal metastasis in 11 dogs. Eight of 13 dogs (62%) with lymphatic metastasis and a lateralised lesion showed contralateral dissemination, while 12/13 (92%) showed ipsilateral metastasis. Of 13 dogs with oral malignant melanoma, four showed metastasis to all four lymph centres. Contralateral metastasis may occur in dogs with malignancies of the head and should be considered during staging and management.