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Heightened risk of canine chocolate exposure at Christmas and Easter
Author(s) -
Noble PeterJohn M,
Newman Jenny,
Wyatt Alison M,
Radford Alan D,
Jones Philip H
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
veterinary record
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.261
H-Index - 99
eISSN - 2042-7670
pISSN - 0042-4900
DOI - 10.1136/vr.104762
Subject(s) - medicine
Chocolate has long been recognised as, and remains, a common cause of intoxication in dogs accounting for 25 per cent of acute presentations for intoxication.1 2 Case numbers in Europe and the UK have been reviewed, mostly based on reports to poisons centres.3–6 Chocolate toxicity results from the methylxanthine theobromine present in cocoa bean products, causing gastrointestinal (eg, vomiting), cardiovascular (eg, tachycardia) and central nervous (eg, agitation and seizure) signs.7 Chocolate intoxication is mostly seen in dogs6 8 and theobromine dose calculations based on the source of chocolate are well documented7 9 and available online. 10 11 The current study reviews cases of chocolate exposure presented to a large sentinel network of UK veterinary practices between 2012 and 2017.Electronic health records were collected from 229 UK veterinary practices (500 premises) by the Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET).12 Records included the consultation time, species, breed, sex and clinical free text (narrative) in which inadvertent personal identifying data contained in narratives had been redacted using deidentification software (Newman). Narratives were screened using a regular expression13 to identify the presence of the word ‘chocolate’, including a range of misspellings and contractions (eg, ‘choc’, ‘choclat’). Cases were tagged for study inclusion if on reading they matched a definition of potential chocolate exposure whereby ingestion triggered …