Japan Animal Referral Medical Center Co., Ltd.

Including Internet of Things (IoT) technology in horse-rearing management can potentially mitigate problems such as human resource shortages and time limitations in performing daily behavior monitoring. In this study, a small and inexpensive activity meter used to monitor dogs and cats (PLUS CYCLE^®, JARMeC, Kanagawa, Japan) was used to monitor the daily behavior of horses. A study was performed to examine the suitability of the PLUS CYCLE^® device for monitoring horses and to determine whether it could estimate horse behavior. The device was equipped with an accelerometer and was used to monitor Kiso horses in horse stalls and pastures after installing the devices at specific locations on headcollars and girths. The amount of activity from the accelerometer showed differences among the horses' behavioral types (lying, standing, walking, and feeding) in the stall, suggesting that it functions in horses. In the pasture, the amount of activity was correlated with GPS movement speed. Then, we tried to establish restricted cubic spline regression models to predict the locomotion speed in the pasture based on the amount of activity, but the prediction accuracy was low. This study showed that PLUS CYCLE^® can be used to monitor horse activity amount during the daily management of individual horses. However, to achieve higher precision in monitoring detailed behaviors, additional investigation and data pertaining to the amount of activity for each horse during rearing in different environments are needed.

Although chemotherapy using CHOP-based protocol induces remission in most cases of canine multicentric high-grade B-cell lymphoma (mhBCL), some cases develop early relapse during the first induction protocol. In this study, we examined the gene expression profiles of canine mhBCL before chemotherapy and investigated their associations with early relapse during the first whole CHOP-based protocol. Twenty-five cases of mhBCL treated with CHOP-based protocol as first induction chemotherapy were included in this study. Sixteen cases completed the first whole CHOP-based protocol without relapse (S-group), and nine developed relapse during the chemotherapy (R-group). RNA-seq was performed on samples from neoplastic lymph nodes. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were extracted by the comparison of gene expression profiles between S- and R-groups, and the differences in the expression levels of these genes were validated by RT-qPCR. Extracted 179 DEGs included the genes related to chemokine CC motif ligand, T-cell receptor signaling pathway, and PD-L1 expression and PD-1 checkpoint pathway. We focused on chemokine CC motif ligand, and CCL4 was confirmed to be significantly downregulated in the R-group (P=0.039). We also focused on the genes related to T-cell signaling pathway, and CD3E (P=0.039), ITK (P=0.023), and LAT (P=0.023) genes were confirmed to be significantly upregulated in the R-group. The current results suggest that both changes in tumor cells and the interactions between tumor cells and immune cells are associated with the efficacy of the chemotherapy for first remission induction.

In the present study, histopathological and immunohistochemical findings of olfactory ganglioneuroblastoma in a dog were compared to those of canine olfactory neuroepithelia and neuroblastomas. Olfactory ganglioneuroblastoma consists of ganglion cell-like tumor cells with Schwannian stroma and neuroblast-like tumor cells. Immunohistochemically, ganglion cell-like tumor cells were immunopositive for synaptophysin, β3-tubulin, and tyrosine hydroxylase, Schwannian stroma was immunopositive for GFAP and SOX2, and neuroblast-like tumor cells were immunopositive for OLIG2, β3-tubulin, SOX2, cytokeratin AE1/AE3, and p63. The immunohistochemical results of olfactory neuroepithelia and olfactory neuroblastomas were similar to those of neuroblast-like tumor cells. These results suggest that the ganglion cell-like tumor cells in the present case have a sympathetic neuron immunophenotype, whereas neuroblast-like tumor cells have an olfactory neuroepithelial immunophenotype.