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Besides its translational value, an improved understanding of dog longevity and mortality is necessary to guide health management decisions, breed selection, and improve dog welfare. In order to analyse the lifespan of dogs in Italy, identify the most common causes of death, and evaluate possible risk factors, anonymised medical records were collected from 9 veterinary teaching hospitals and 2 public health institutions. Data regarding breed, sex, neuter status, age, diagnosis, and mechanism of death were retrieved. Cause of death (COD) was classified by pathophysiologic process (PP) and organ system (OS). Of the 4957 dogs that died between 2004 and 2020 included in the study, 2920 (59.0%) were purebred, 2293 (46.2%) were female, 3005 (60.6%) were intact, 2883 (58.2%) were euthanised. Overall median longevity was 10.0 years. Median longevity was significantly longer for crossbreds, females, neutered dogs, and small-sized breeds. The breeds with the highest median age at death were the Yorkshire terrier, English cocker spaniel, West Highland white terrier, Italian volpino, and Shih Tzu, whilst the American bulldog, English bulldog, American pit bull terrier, Bernese mountain dog and the Maremma and the Abruzzes sheepdog had the lowest median age at death. The most frequent COD by PP was neoplasia (34.0%), which occurred more frequently in large breeds, namely German shepherd, Labrador retriever and Boxer. Degenerative diseases mostly affected small-sized dogs like Miniature pinscher and Dachshund. Regarding the OS involved, diseases of the renal/urinary system were most frequently responsible for COD (15.0%), prevalently degenerative and inflammatory/infectious. Substantial variation in median longevity according to causes of death by PP and OS was observed. These data are relevant for breeders, veterinary practitioners, and owners, to assist breed selection, facilitate early diagnosis, guide choice when purchasing a purebred dog and making health management decisions, and ultimately improve dog welfare., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest We have no conflicts of interest to disclose and we did not receive any financial support., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The risks associated with zoonotic infections transmitted by companion animals are a serious public health concern: the control of zoonoses incidence in domestic dogs, both owned and stray, is hence important to protect human health. Integrated dog population management (DPM) programs, based on the availability of information systems providing reliable data on the structure and composition of the existing dog population in a given area, are fundamental for making realistic plans for any disease surveillance and action system. Traceability systems, based on the compulsory electronic identification of dogs and their registration in a computerised database, are one of the most effective ways to ensure the usefulness of DPM programs. Even if this approach provides many advantages, several areas of improvement have emerged in countries where it has been applied. In Italy, every region hosts its own dog register but these are not compatible with one another. This paper shows the advantages of a web-based-application to improve data management of dog regional registers. The approach used for building this system was inspired by farm animal traceability schemes and it relies on a network of services that allows multi-channel access by different devices and data exchange via the web with other existing applications, without changing the pre-existing platforms. Today the system manages a database for over 300,000 dogs registered in three different Italian regions. By integrating multiple Web Services, this approach could be the solution to gather data at national and international levels at reasonable cost and creating a traceability system on a large scale and across borders that can be used for disease surveillance and development of population management plans., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)