Longevity and mortality in cats: A single institution necropsy study of 3108 cases (1989–2019)

Michael S. Kent; Sophie Karchemskiy; William T. N. Culp; Amandine T. Lejeune; Patricia A. Pesavento; Christine Toedebusch; Rachel Brady; Robert Rebhun

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0278199

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJuly 11, 2022
26 Sep 2022 Decision Letter - Silvia Sabattini, Editor PONE-D-22-19408Longevity and mortality in cats: A single institution necropsy study of 3108 cases (1989-2019)PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Kent, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Nov 10 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. We understand that the electronic medical record database of the UC Davis William R. Pritchard Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital was accessed to evaluate the records of all cats undergoing necropsy examinations. Please clarify whether the authors had access to personal identifying information from the cat owners. 3. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. 4. In your Data Availability statement, you have not specified where the minimal data set underlying the results described in your manuscript can be found. PLOS defines a study's minimal data set as the underlying data used to reach the conclusions drawn in the manuscript and any additional data required to replicate the reported study findings in their entirety. All PLOS journals require that the minimal data set be made fully available. For more information about our data policy, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability. Upon re-submitting your revised manuscript, please upload your study’s minimal underlying data set as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and include the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers within your revised cover letter. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. Any potentially identifying patient information must be fully anonymized. Important: If there are ethical or legal restrictions to sharing your data publicly, please explain these restrictions in detail. Please see our guidelines for more information on what we consider unacceptable restrictions to publicly sharing data: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. Note that it is not acceptable for the authors to be the sole named individuals responsible for ensuring data access. We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter. 5. Please upload a copy of Supplemental Table 1 and Table 2 which you refer to in your text on page 10 and 16. 6. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. 7. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The authors did an outstanding epidemiological study on the main causes of death in cats, reviewing more than 3000 necropsies in detail, and putting the data in correct correlation and statistics. This paper deserves publication as it’s important the scientific contribution given to the veterinary community. Just very few corrections to the manuscript are reported. Line 96 – There’s a typo in the word “Research”. Line 96 – “With a complete” instead of “completed”. Line 273 – Typo Line 297 – Please rephrase the period. Line 318 – is “at” a typo? Line 334 – What kind of macroscopic or histopathological findings were present in cardiac disease bearing animals? Could you please rephrase the entire period, because it doesn’t sound fluid in reading. Thanks. Line 510-513 – This was not mentioned in the results (as previous comment requested). Can you please add more specific details of the cardiac pathologies found? Table 3 and 4 - These tables are really difficult to understand. My suggestion would be to make them in a clear way, or delete them at all. Reviewer #2: The manuscript is very good and the topic very interesting. The manuscript is well written, the study is well designed and based on several well exposed exposed data. Results are very interesting and well commented in the discussion. The manuscript is a little bit long, but I suggest to maintain this lenght because the manuscript is not boring: it is simply very complete. It is maybe the first time in my life that I really have no critics to do. I have a simple suggestion to improve the study: practically no data are present in literature concerning causes of death in pet animals. A recent paper, published on "Animals", analysed the causes of death in colony cats. It would be interesting to insert, in the present manuscript, few sentences comapring the causes of death of owned cat with those of free cats ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278199.r001
Revision 1
5 Oct 2022 Author Response Dear editor and reviewers; Thank you very much for the effort and time put into reviewing our manuscript. We have done our best to address the issues raised and look forward to your re-review of the manuscript. Please find answers to all the comment integrated into the text below. Respectfully submitted, Michael Kent, DVM, DACVIM (Oncology), DACVR (Radiation Oncology), ECVDI (RO-Add on) 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. I have reviewed the files and believe that I have followed the guidelines for this. 2. We understand that the electronic medical record database of the UC Davis William R. Pritchard Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital was accessed to evaluate the records of all cats undergoing necropsy examinations. Please clarify whether the authors had access to personal identifying information from the cat owners. As the faculty and students at our institution we have access to all records and all information that is in the EMR, although owner information beyond contact information is not stored in our EMR. For the purposes of this study this limited owner information that is collected was not accessed. All owner’s given verbal or written consent for necropsy examination and are informed that the results are stored for research as our tissue samples (which were not accessed for this study). 3. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. These were the same funder but I have expanded this to include all the information in the financial disclosure section. 4. In your Data Availability statement, you have not specified where the minimal data set underlying the results described in your manuscript can be found. PLOS defines a study's minimal data set as the underlying data used to reach the conclusions drawn in the manuscript and any additional data required to replicate the reported study findings in their entirety. All PLOS journals require that the minimal data set be made fully available. For more information about our data policy, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability. Upon re-submitting your revised manuscript, please upload your study’s minimal underlying data set as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and include the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers within your revised cover letter. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. Any potentially identifying patient information must be fully anonymized. We have made a new supplemental file with the data set used in this study to ensure full access to the data. 5. Please upload a copy of Supplemental Table 1 and Table 2 which you refer to in your text on page 10 and 16. These have been uploaded along with the revised manuscript. 6. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. These have been placed at the end after the reference list. 7. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. The reference list has been reviewed. No paper that we have cited has been retracted. Reviewer #1: The authors did an outstanding epidemiological study on the main causes of death in cats, reviewing more than 3000 necropsies in detail, and putting the data in correct correlation and statistics. This paper deserves publication as it’s important the scientific contribution given to the veterinary community. We appreciate your opinion on our work and its value. Thank you. Just very few corrections to the manuscript are reported. Line 96 – There’s a typo in the word “Research”. Corrected – thank you Line 96 – “With a complete” instead of “completed”. Change made as requested. Line 273 – Typo Change made as requested. Line 297 – Please rephrase the period. Rephrased. Line 318 – is “at” a typo? Yes it was – thank you for finding this. Line 334 – What kind of macroscopic or histopathological findings were present in cardiac disease bearing animals? Could you please rephrase the entire period, because it doesn’t sound fluid in reading. Thanks. We have edited the sentence as suggested and added the following to the manuscript in the results section. A total of 867 (27.90%) cats were found to have some form of cardiac pathology with it being attributed as the cause of death in 224 (25.84%) of those cases. The most common cardiac abnormality noted was hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (392 cases with it being identified as the cause of death in 145 cases). This was followed by endocardiosis with 85 cases (where it was identified as the main driver of mortality in 13 cases), myocarditis with 59 cases (where it cause death in 8 cases), and myocardial fibrosis (where it was identified as the cause of death in 8 cases). Line 510-513 – This was not mentioned in the results (as previous comment requested). Can you please add more specific details of the cardiac pathologies found? Please see above comment where this information was added. Table 3 and 4 - These tables are really difficult to understand. My suggestion would be to make them in a clear way, or delete them at all. We have tried to better explain the table but do feel the information is valuable for determining how often multiple cancers or types of renal disease were present. We have made the following changes to the table lead in and titles to help better explain the data in the tables: A complete table of tumor categories broken down by the number of cancers for each cat is available in Table 3. Table 3: Frequency of occurrence of tumor types and number of tumors seen in each cat. For a complete breakdown of kidney disease in these cats see Table 4. This table also shows which cats had multiple renal pathologies and which type of kidney disease occurred together in a single cat. Reviewer #2: The manuscript is very good and the topic very interesting. The manuscript is well written, the study is well designed and based on several well exposed exposed data. Results are very interesting and well commented in the discussion. The manuscript is a little bit long, but I suggest to maintain this length because the manuscript is not boring: it is simply very complete. It is maybe the first time in my life that I really have no critics to do. Thank you for your review of our work and we value and appreciate your opinion. I have a simple suggestion to improve the study: practically no data are present in literature concerning causes of death in pet animals. A recent paper, published on "Animals", analysed the causes of death in colony cats. It would be interesting to insert, in the present manuscript, few sentences comparing the causes of death of owned cat with those of free cats We were unaware of this study – thank you for bringing it to our attention. We have added the following to the manuscript in the discussion section: In a study looking at causes of death in cats living in free roaming colonies in the city of Milan, Italy the most common causes of death included inflammatory diseases (which included infectious causes), organ failure and trauma[14]. It is not surprising that the results in this study differed given that these animals were unowned and faced different pressures than owned cats. Feline infectious peritonitis was still prominent cause of death in these cats with 13/186 (7%) cats dying of this disease, which was quite similar to the 6.72% of cats in our study who died of this. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278199.r002
14 Nov 2022 Decision Letter - Silvia Sabattini, Editor Longevity and mortality in cats: A single institution necropsy study of 3108 cases (1989-2019) PONE-D-22-19408R1 Dear Dr. Kent, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Silvia Sabattini Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: (No Response) Reviewer #2: Authors accepted all comments and did related corrections The manuscript is now improved and, on my opinion, suitable for publication ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278199.r003
Formally Accepted
21 Nov 2022 Acceptance Letter - Silvia Sabattini, Editor PONE-D-22-19408R1 Longevity and mortality in cats: A single institution necropsy study of 3108 cases (1989-2019) Dear Dr. Kent: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Silvia Sabattini Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278199.r004

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