Discrepancy between Clinical and Postmortem Diagnosis of Dogs in a Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital

ABSTRACT

Background: The postmortem examination offers the opportunity to study the processes involved in disease. Although a portion of veterinary medical professionals and students consider the necropsy as a diagnostic tool of purely academic interest, it can provide valuable assistance in formulating health strategies in order to prevent and control animal diseases. The number of necropsies performed in general is higher in universities where the cost is subsidized. In veterinary medicine, studies intended to assess the frequency of necropsy and the discrepancy between clinical and postmortem diagnosis of dogs are rare. The main purpose of the necropsy is to discover the cause of death of dogs, by defining a possible etiology and pathogenesis in order to reach a diagnosis.Material, Methods & Results: We used medical records and necropsy records to define the clinical and postmortem diagnosis, respectively. Data relating to deaths was recorded as the number of euthanized dogs and natural deaths in 2014. From the information cause of death, these were categorized as infectious disease, cardiac, gastrointestinal, renal, pulmonary, neurological, metabolic or endocrine disease, neoplastic disease, trauma, or systemic disease. We used the Binomial discrepancy in the comparison of the rates between different years and also to verify the association between discrepancy and the correlatio