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Not a one-way road-Severity, progression and prevention of firework fears in dogs.

ABSTRACT: Noise fears represent a highly prevalent welfare problem in dogs. An online survey was performed to explore severity and progression of firework fears in dogs, and relationships with demographics, health, behaviour problems and owners' training efforts to prevent or alleviate firework fears. Fifty-two percent of dogs in the sample (N = 1225) were at least partially affected by firework fears, and the majority developed a fear of fireworks in the first year of life, with a decreasing frequency of new occurrences up until seven years, and only few newly affected dogs beyond this age. While almost three-quarters of fearful dogs had recovered by the next morning following firework exposure, recovery took up to one day in 10%, up to one week in 12%, and several weeks or even months in >3%. Univariate analyses indicated a significant effect of breed group, age, sex, neuter status, origin and age at acquisition on severity of firework fears in dogs. However, binomial models including multiple predictors of presence/ absence of firework fears identified only age, breed group (mixed breeds being most affected), health problems, and an interaction between health problems and age as significant predictors. This discrepancy might be explained by collinearities of predictors and underlying differences between mixed-breed dogs and purebreds, such as mixed breeds being acquired from shelters more often and being neutered more often. Firework fears are highly correlated with fears of gunshots and thunder, and to a low extent with fears of other noises, but not with any other behavioural problems. Both improvement and deterioration of firework fears were frequently reported. While an early age of onset and breed differences point to a strong genetic contribution to firework fears, the data indicate that training puppies or non-fearful adults to associate the noise with positive stimuli is highly effective in preventing later development of firework fears.

SUBMITTER: Riemer S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6730926 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BackgroundA family of parsimonious Gaussian mixture models for the biclustering of gene expression data is introduced. Biclustering is accommodated by adopting a mixture of factor analyzers model with a binary, row-stochastic factor loadings matrix. This particular form of factor loadings matrix results in a block-diagonal covariance matrix, which is a useful property in gene expression analyses, specifically in biomarker discovery scenarios where blood can potentially act as a surrogate tissue for other less accessible tissues. Prior knowledge of the factor loadings matrix is useful in this application and is reflected in the one-way supervised nature of the algorithm. Additionally, the factor loadings matrix can be assumed to be constant across all components because of the relationship desired between the various types of tissue samples. Parameter estimates are obtained through a variant of the expectation-maximization algorithm and the best-fitting model is selected using the Bayesian information criterion. The family of models is demonstrated using simulated data and two real microarray data sets. The first real data set is from a rat study that investigated the influence of diabetes on gene expression in different tissues. The second real data set is from a human transcriptomics study that focused on blood and immune tissues. The microarray data sets illustrate the biclustering family's performance in biomarker discovery involving peripheral blood as surrogate biopsy material.ResultsThe simulation studies indicate that the algorithm identifies the correct biclusters, most optimally when the number of observation clusters is known. Moreover, the biclustering algorithm identified biclusters comprised of biologically meaningful data related to insulin resistance and immune function in the rat and human real data sets, respectively.ConclusionsInitial results using real data show that this biclustering technique provides a novel approach for biomarker discovery by enabling blood to be used as a surrogate for hard-to-obtain tissues.

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Not a one-way road-Severity, progression and prevention of firework fears in dogs.

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