University of Edinburgh Easter Bush School and Hospital for Small Animals
The University of Edinburgh’s Easter Bush Clinical Pathologists and Hospital for Small Animals’ Specialists in Internal Medicine, have validated the BÜHLMANN fCAL® turbo assay for use on their Beckman analyser. The test has now been made available by the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies to help veterinary surgeons diagnose and monitor chronic inflammatory enteropathy in their feline and canine patients.
The clinical value of faecal calprotectin (fCAL) in humans has been recognised for many years, for the differentiation of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and the monitoring of IBD positive patients in the management of their disease.
We have reported previously on some of the studies that have evaluated fCAL in dogs and cats and even in Jock the Silverback Gorilla at Bristol zoo. These studies demonstrate that fCAL can also assess intestinal inflammation in these animal groups, though values are much lower (cut off in the literature is around 48 µg/g) than the ones seen in IBD in people. Nevertheless, the results can still be of value diagnostically.
Dogs and cats with acute and chronic diarrhoea have been found to have significantly higher fCAL levels than healthy controls. Like their human counterparts, fCAL increases in dogs with IBD (in small animals called chronic enteropathy; CE) and decreases with successful treatment. fCAL correlates with clinical severity as assessed by the CCECAI (canine chronic enteropathy clinical activity index) and with severity on histopathology.
In one study, fCAL values of >15.2 µg/g were able to differentiate dogs with CE, that required immunosuppressive treatment, from others.
Elevated levels were also more commonly seen in dogs with partial or no response, compared to complete/ good response to treatment, though there are issues with assay precision at lower values.
