Early Life Modifiable Exposures and Their Association With Owner Reported Inflammatory Bowel Disease Symptoms in Adult Dogs

Abstract

Background: Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is an idiopathic multifactorial disease in humans and dogs, usually assigned to the interactions between genes, gut microbiota, diet, environment, and the immune system. We aimed to investigate the modifiable early life exposures associated with IBD in dogs.Materials and Methods: The study data was extracted from the validated owner-reported DogRisk food frequency questionnaire. This was a cross-sectional questionnaire-based study that tested 21 different early life dietary and environmental, demographic and genetic variables for their association with IBD or not, in adult dogs. A total of 7,015 dogs participated in this study. The study covered early life periods; prenatal, neonatal, early, and late postnatal periods. Two feeding patterns, a non-processed meat-based diet (NPMD) and an ultra-processed carbohydrate-based diet (UPCD) were studied. Data was analyzed using logistic regression analysis with a backward stepwise deletion.Results: From the final models we found that the NPMD during early and late postnatal periods were significantly associated with lower IBD risk later in life. The UPCD during the same periods was associated with a higher risk of IBD incidence. Also, the maternal diet during the neonatal period showed a non-significant trend of lower IBD risk in the offspring with the NPMD and a higher IBD risk with the UPCD. Additionally, the normal body weight of puppies during the first 6 months of age was associated with a lower risk of IBD in adulthood while, slim puppies associated significantly with IBD in adulthood. From the non-modifiable background variables, we identified the maternal history of IBD as the strongest risk factor for later incidence of IBD. Furthermore, male dogs were twice as likely to develop IBD as female dogs were.Conclusions: It is reassuring for owners to know that they themselves can have an impact on their dog's health. A high-fat, low-carbohydrate NPMD exposure during early life, and a normal body condition in puppyhood were significantly associated with less IBD in adult dogs. The opposite was true for UPCD exposure and abnormal body condition score in 6 month old puppies.

Environmental risk factors in puppies and kittens for developing chronic disorders in adulthood: A call for research on developmental programming

“…A similar study also found that previous parvovirus enteritis was a risk factor for persistent gastrointestinal signs, and among dogs that had recovered from parvovirus infection, markers of disease severity were associated with that risk (133). In another study, early modifiable risk factors for CE in adulthood included vaccination of the dam during pregnancy, type of solid food fed to puppies during the first 6 months, and the puppy's body condition ("slim" rather than "normal weight") (134). These results should be interpreted with caution because of methodological limitations such as retrospective owner questionnaires, participant bias and broad diet types that were not nutritionally controlled.…”

Harnessing the Biology of Canine Intestinal Organoids to Heighten Understanding of Inflammatory Bowel Disease Pathogenesis and Accelerate Drug Discovery: A One Health Approach

“…Furthermore, diet has also been shown to impact mucosal microbiota and the GI metabolome and mucosal microbiota in dogs with cIBD (Atherly et al, 2019;Ambrosini et al, 2020a). Recently, early-life risk factors for developing IBD have been an area of interest and studies have identified similar findings in dogs and humans with cIBD/IBD such as an association with early life high-fat low-carbohydrate diets and the later development of IBD/cIBD (Hemida et al, 2021). Like humans, a diagnosis of cIBD is made based on chronic GI signs, eliminating other known causes of intestinal inflammation and histopathologic confirmation of intestinal inflammation.…”

Chronic Intestinal Disorders in Humans and Pets: Current Management and the Potential of Nutraceutical Antioxidants as Alternatives

“…In veterinary medicine, the use of the term chronic enteropathies (CE) is preferred instead of IBD to identify a group of idiopathic intestinal disorders with evident GI signs (recurrent or chronic), and inflammation in the lamina propria of the small intestine, large intestine, or both [ 5 ]. Nonetheless, several phenotypes of IBD have been identified in dogs [ 6 ]. In fact, IBD in dogs has different forms when compared to humans, where more standardized clinical, endoscopic, and pathologic aspects can be found [ 7 , 8 ].…”