Hair and saliva analysis fails to accurately identify atopic dogs or differentiate real and fake samples

[Guest dog person]

Veterinary Dermatology   Scientific Paper   First published: 24 January 2019       

Conflicts of Interest: No conflicts of interest have been declared.

Sources of Funding: This study was funded by the Veterinary Information Network and by Joseph Bernstein.

click on link for full article, excerpt below

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/vde.12716

Results

Positive test results were provided by the direct‐to‐consumer pet allergy for all submitted samples, including synthetic fur and saline. The test results for healthy and atopic animal samples were no different from each other or from synthetic fur and saline samples. Reproducibility for paired samples was not different from random chance. The results for real animals correlated strongly with results for synthetic fur and saline samples (r = 0.71, P < 0.05).

Conclusions and clinical importance

The direct‐to‐consumer hair and saliva test for pet allergies examined in this study performed no better than chance and the results were not reproducible.

 

Edited February 6, 2019 by dog person