Study database
Work that fits none of the designs above, including methodological contributions and overviews.
MUMultiple species
The review rates the superficial digital flexor tendon of the horse as a functionally and clinically equivalent model of the human Achilles tendon, but stresses that it represents only the acute rupture and not chronic tendon pain.
MUMultiple species
The review describes persistent inflammation, excessive vascular ingrowth and immature repair tissue as the central reasons why healed tendon tissue does not reach the mechanical competence of the original.
HOHorse
Review: serum amyloid A outperforms the other equine acute phase proteins because of its kinetics; white blood cells and serum iron change within hours, serum amyloid A within a day, fibrinogen only after two to three days, yet most published studies cover very small animal numbers.
HOHorse
Review: serum amyloid A is the most important acute phase protein of the horse, very low in healthy animals and, thanks to its short half-life, well suited to following the course of a condition, including subclinical disturbances in sport horses.
MUMultiple species
Review: serum amyloid A consists of 104 amino acids, is strongly conserved across vertebrate evolution and can rise up to a thousandfold within 24 hours; it also acts in a cytokine-like way itself and is not merely a passive marker.
MUMultiple species
Review: the resolution of inflammation is a biosynthetically active process, steered by lipoxins from arachidonic acid together with resolvins, protectins and maresins from EPA and DHA, which support the defence against pathogens and tissue regeneration without suppressing the immune response.
MUMultiple species
Review: the NLRP3 inflammasome recognises both foreign patterns from pathogens and the body's own danger signals from damaged cells, then assembles and steers the maturation and release of interleukin-1 and interleukin-18; it is involved in numerous chronic inflammatory conditions.
MUMultiple species
The review argues that severe equine asthma serves as a naturally occurring model of dust-related asthma in humans, because irritant, course and tissue changes largely coincide.
MUMultiple species
Human asthma mostly runs eosinophilic, the severe equine form by contrast neutrophilic; that is precisely why it is drawn on as a model for the hard-to-treat neutrophilic asthma of humans.
HOHorse
Segregation analyses in the offspring of two affected Warmblood stallions and in 401 Swiss Warmbloods support a mixed inheritance model with one major gene, whose expression remains tied to hay exposure.
SPSpecies-independent
Introduces the GRADE framework and makes the case for a strict separation between the certainty of the evidence (four levels) and the strength of a recommendation.
SPSpecies-independent
Argues that systematic reviews and meta-analyses are not the top level of the pyramid but the tool with which the levels beneath them are read.
MUMultiple species
Secondary analysis of the placebo groups: a literature review found six placebo-controlled studies, five of them with usable data on 96 cats; 54 to 74 per cent counted as a success in the owners’ judgement, but only 10 to 63 per cent by objectively measured activity.
SPSpecies-independent
Between 1991 and 2014 the number of systematic reviews published each year rose by 2,728 per cent, against 153 per cent for all indexed papers; on antidepressants alone, 185 meta-analyses appeared between 2007 and 2014, and the author holds the majority of this output to be redundant or misleading.
HUHuman
Argues that the rigid evidence pyramid is unsuited to safety questions after authorisation, and proposes a hierarchy-free model in which randomised and real-world care data complement each other.
HOHorse
Telephone advice for colic varied considerably between practices, most of all on movement and safety, and practice teams named sweating and recumbency as the most important signs of critical cases recognisable by phone.
HOHorse
Narrative review of the epidemiology of colic: it holds that colic is not a single disease but a syndrome of abdominal pain with several underlying disease processes and a multifactorial origin, and it sets prevention, diagnosis and research gaps in context.
HUHuman
Review: less than one to two per cent of body magnesium sits in the blood and the extracellular space, no single marker reliably reflects whole-body stores, and the serum value can miss a subclinical depletion.
HUHuman
Comprehensive review: magnesium is a cofactor in more than 600 enzyme reactions; body stores are governed by the gut, the kidney and bone, and several drug classes, among them proton pump inhibitors and diuretics, can trigger hypomagnesaemia.
MUMultiple species
Review of renal physiology: most reabsorption runs passively between the cells through claudin pores, while the fine tuning happens in the distal tubule via the TRPM6 and TRPM7 channels.
MUMultiple species
Review of the ruminant: magnesium is taken up predominantly across the rumen wall, high potassium concentrations in the rumen inhibit this voltage-dependent transport, and no hormonal feedback system for magnesium exists.
MUMultiple species
A data compilation covering 37 herbivore species shows that equids, kangaroos and rabbits produce little methane relative to body size, intake and retention time, and that the split into foregut and hindgut fermenters does not explain the differences.
MUMultiple species
The review states that concentrations of short-chain fatty acids in digesta or faeces are no measure of their production or absorption rate, and that results without dose-response and time-course experiments can be misleading.
HUHuman
The review estimates the contribution of colonic fermentation to human energy supply at 5 to 10 per cent and explicitly sets it apart from the considerably higher share in herbivores; still the authoritative reference value today.
MUMultiple species
Simulations based on 440 preclinical studies of 13 interventions: single-laboratory designs mostly failed to estimate effect sizes accurately, and larger samples made this worse still; designs with two to four laboratories raised accuracy by up to 42 percentage points.
MUMultiple species
Review: scaling by body size fails for strongly protein-bound, extensively metabolised, actively transported or biliary excreted substances, and where species differ in the quantity, binding strength and distribution of the target structures.
HOHorse
Review: the horse comes closer to human cartilage and subchondral bone thickness than the usual models; defects can be created and followed up arthroscopically, and loading after treatment can be controlled.
MUMultiple species
Workshop review: the horse’s superficial digital flexor tendon is regarded as the naturally diseasing counterpart of human Achilles tendinopathy, and tears of the deep digital flexor tendon as the counterpart of rotator cuff tears within the tendon sheath; the authors recommend transferring the study methodology of human medicine to equine studies.
Once a month: new syntheses, checked studies, and what has changed in the state of the evidence.