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Description:
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The measurement of pain has had a growing importance in animals for both privately owned animals and those animals involved in clinical research . Lameness is considered to be 1 aspect of the pain experience . The ability of a veterinarian to assess lameness during a routine orthopedic examination can be difficult given the short amount of time in which the clinician can observe the animal , and the fact that the animal is in a stressful environment . Thus , the input of the owner concerning the animal's well -being over an extended time period may be extremely useful to the clinician in assessing the degree of lameness of the animal . It was the purpose of this study to establish an instrument that was both repeatable and valid in assessing the degree of lameness . The instrument used was a questionnaire containing 39 questions in a visual analog scale format . A force platform was used as the gold -standard for detecting mechanical lameness . Peak vertical , cranial -caudal , and their associated impulses were forces used to determine lameness , along with maximum slope in some cases . A test -retest measure of repeatability was conducted on a subset of 19 dogs that were confirmed to have less than a 10 % change in vertical peak force . Nineteen of the 39 questions were found to be repeatable based on a Spearman rank correlation . These 19 questions were then used as predictor variables in several multiple regression models which predicted force plate measurements . The result was 3 different models each containing 7 independent variables that were thought to be valid representations of the forces measured (vertical peak , vertical impulse , and propulsion peak forces ) . Each reduced model was found to fit the data as well as the full model containing all 19 of the repeatable questions . The composite of 11 questions from the 3 different models was used to calculate a total score . This total score was found to be significantly correlated with force plate measurements . These 11 questions should be useful to a clinician in detecting the degree of lameness in the dog . |