It’s an age-old question – do we stop moving as much because we get older, or get older because we stop moving around as much?

  • Most of us will have seen the despondent face on a relative or friend who has just been told by their doctor that their aches and pains are just a symptom of “getting old”.
    It’s one of many things which makes getting older such an unattractive prospect.
    But what if “grinning and bearing the ageing process” was not in fact the right advice and something practical could be done to reduce discomfort? This is turn could lead to increased activity and maintenance of fitness; recognized to be one of the best ways to maintain capabilities at any age.

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  • Health-related quality of life (HRQL) has been the cornerstone of outcomes research for three decades and increasingly is an important focus in human health measurement where instruments are developed to measure chronic disease in people through its impact on HRQL. An important goal of evidence-based medicine has been to incorporate patient reported HRQL scales to better assess clinical outcome.

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  • Canine obesity is increasing in prevalence in the UK and raises concerns about dog welfare.  This study compares the health-related quality of life (HRQL) of dogs of varying body condition: overweight and obese (BCS 4 and 5) versus non-overweight (BCS 2 and 3), obese (BCS 5) versus non-overweight (BCS2 and 3) and an overall comparison between all four BCS (BCS 2, 3, 4 and 5) using a novel, validated HRQL instrument which is both web and mobile tablet / phone app based.

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  • Our ability to measure pain in a valid and reliable way is a crucial component of effective pain management.  Furthermore the current emphasis on evidence-based veterinary medicine requires that appropriate measures of clinical impact are developed and in that regard it is essential that instruments to monitor pain effectively in an individual, while providing data to enable the selection of treatments with know efficacy and impact are developed.  In veterinary medicine, many pain scales have been constructed on an ad hoc basis, but the importance of applying rigorous methods to the development and testing of pain measures in order to ensure their validity and reliability is now recognised.

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